


between two lives

by neonheartbeat



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Awkward Romance, Ben Solo is a Mess, Cunnilingus, F/M, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Military Backstory, Model Rey, Nightmares, Oral Sex, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Sexual Dysfunction, Sexual Experimentation, Small Towns, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, mechanic ben
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:20:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24086506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neonheartbeat/pseuds/neonheartbeat
Summary: Rey Niima, a model driving from Chicago to New York, finds herself broken down in the middle of nowhere, Indiana, without any way to fix her rented car. Ben Solo, the big, silent, resident jack-of-all-trades in Kirby, a town with almost two hundred people, happens to come across her on the road, and offers her a place to wait for a tow, but Ben has a secret he's not willing to share, and Rey is determined to find out what it is...
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 477
Kudos: 843





	1. kirby

**Author's Note:**

> General cw for descriptions of violence that'll come up in Chapter 3!

It had been cheaper to just drive from Chicago to New York. 

That had been the reasoning behind renting this stupid Honda Civic in the first place: a flight cost two hundred bucks and even factoring in costs of gas for a twelve hour drive, it was less expensive, especially when she hadn’t been on a tight schedule. Until, of course, construction had redirected her GPS from I-90 to I-80, taking her further south through towns with names like Convoy and Delphos, and then as she was coming up on an intersection with a road called only the 699 the Civic had groaned and started billowing white and blue smoke from under the hood, sending Rey’s heart into her throat and her arms into a fast right turn as the car sputtered and bumped to a stop, the engine dying, the pedals refusing to move or do anything at all.

It was easily ninety degrees, and Rey got out of the car in her crisp white silk blouse and khaki shorts, staring at the car in disbelief. This could not be happening to her. What the _hell._ She checked her phone: no signal, no WiFi, nothing. 

“I have,” she ground out through her teeth as she marched to the hood and lifted it, “a fucking _shoot_ to make on _Fifth fucking Avenue,_ you piece of shit car.” Streetwear, some Japanese brand, she thought— couldn’t remember, not when she was staring into the mechanics of a busted Honda engine. Was that black smoke, too? Oil leak? What happened? 

Rey turned around and looked for a sign, anything that would mark a human settlement out here in this wasteland of cows and corn. _Kirby, 1 mile,_ read a hand-lettered sign nailed to a post, and her heart slowed a little. Great. Perfect. She had money, plenty of money, and if Kirby had a mechanic or a tow truck or anything at all, she’d pay anything to get the car running again. _I’ll be back on the road in a couple of hours,_ she thought, trying to relax, _and in New York by Friday like I planned, and everything’s gonna be okay._

She tried to breathe. Couldn’t call her agent to let her know about anything at the moment, and that was okay, because she was gonna make it. 

Rey shouldered her tote bag and shut the car, locked it, and put the keys into her pocket, then started her walk down the gravelly road in her Sperry boat shoes.

* * *

By the time she’d reached the town of Kirby, which boasted exactly a hundred and thirty people, according to the green sign out front, the backs of her heels were already screaming in pain, rubbed raw from the little socks designed to be unseen in low-slung shoes and not much else. Rey was sure she was bleeding, but she didn’t care. Her blouse was limp with sweat, her shorts were dusty, and her artfully done messy bun was reduced to a straggling, limp knot on her head. 

_Mechanic, a mechanic. I have to find a repair shop._ She was limping a little as she made her way down the main street, which was literally called Main Street and had none of the picturesque, Mayberry-style aesthetic you’d expect to come with a name like that. Dingy buildings with swinging doors, old homes, yards full of rusting cars, a brick church, an old post office. She was so thirsty. Her bottle of VOSS water was long since empty and stuffed into her tote. _How can there be no mechanic in a town full of fucking cars?_

A big man was ambling down the road, coming towards her. He wore a grimy white T-shirt and a blue and black flannel shirt with worn Wrangler jeans and boots, and he had on a trucker-style baseball cap jammed over his long, greasy dark hair that was so stained and brown she could barely read it. As he got closer she could see it said FALCON TRAILERS: THE CATTLE TRAILER SPECIALISTS in red. Rey wanted to cross to the other side of the road, but couldn’t. Her feet hurt too much.

“Ma’am?”

She lifted her head. The guy was looking at her, waiting for a response. A very badly groomed dark mustache and patchy beard coated his chin and lip, and the right side of his face sported a very gnarly looking old scar from his eyebrow to his jaw. “Wh— me?” she panted.

The dark, shadowed eyes narrowed under the brim of the old hat. “Yes’m. You lost?”

“I—” Rey drew her hand over her eyes, glad she’d decided to forgo any makeup on the road. “Yeah. Yes. Sorry. My car broke down. I walked a mile to get here. You don’t know— are there any mechanics here? I have to get back to the interstate. I have an— an appointment in New York City.”

He blinked. “What kind?”

Rey gripped her tote handle, unnerved by his slow, steady gaze. “What?”

His lips quirked, like he was possibly considering laughing at her, and why wouldn’t he? She might as well have been from the damn moon to this guy. “The car. What kind?”

“Um. A Civic. Honda Civic. Twenty-ten.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“Started pouring smoke out of the hood, steering wheel locked up. Couldn’t accelerate, had to pull over up by the, the intersection with the road up there.” Rey jabbed a thumb behind her. “I-80. It’s on the shoulder. Has anyone here got a tow truck, or is it just cows and tractors?”

The man tilted his head, looking down at the ground. “Your blister’s busted.”

Rey looked down. Shit. He was right. The back of her Sperrys were stained dark red. “Oh, fuck me,” she muttered. That would look horrible on camera. Amilyn would kill her.

He coughed. “I got a pickup truck. You can show me where the car is. I’ll take a gander at the engine, if you want.”

Rey looked back up. _I’m about to climb into a truck with a backwoods man who I don’t know who’s a head taller than me. Perfect. Day can’t get worse._ “Okay. But if you— if this is a trick, I’ll—”

“Ain’t no trick,” he said, sounding tired as he rubbed the back of his neck. “C’mon. You got a name?”

“Rey,” she said, limping after him as he strode back the way he’d come. “Rey Niima.” She didn’t expect him to know who she was— after all, they were in the middle of nowhere, Indiana, but he shot her a sidelong glance. 

“Oh. You’re the lady from the, uh, the magazine?”

“I’ve been in a couple. You’ll have to be more specific,” she said tightly, biting her lip as a stab of pain shot through her foot. 

“Vogue,” he said, rounding a corner by a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with hand-lettered windows promising chicken-fried steak and all-day breakfast. “Think you wore a Burberry coat.”

Rey blinked. “I’m stunned you even know what Burberry is. Yeah, that was me. Two years ago, shot their fall collection.”

If he was insulted by the remark, he didn’t show it. A big, pale finger pointed to a beat-up gray F-250 with mud caked on the tires up to the running boards. “There’s th’ truck. Sorry she’s a mess.” He opened the passenger side door for her, and she hesitated, but the inside of the truck was very clean, nothing like the outside. “Took her through the back fields lookin’ for an escaped cow.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” Rey muttered, and climbed up, settling into the seat and exhaling in relief as the weight came off her foot. He shut the door and came around to the driver’s side, sliding in. The whole cab seemed to tilt and settle under his weight as he shut the door: he was a big man with broad shoulders who probably weighed close to two hundred pounds. 

“All right. Let’s go find your car.”

* * *

It was a quick drive back out to where the Honda was waiting, sad and lonely among the rippling corn on both sides of the road. The man got out and clomped up to the open hood, peering in, then got down on his knees to look underneath as Rey, curious, opened her door and stepped out to him. Her feet were still killing her, but she wanted to know what the problem was more than anything. “Does it look bad?” she piped up.

He jumped, startled, and bashed his head on the front bumper. “ _What_ in the— ” he hissed, pushing back the hat and rubbing his head. Rey could see his nose (large, possibly broken at some point) had been sunburned, but his forehead remained very pale, almost untouched by the sun under that hat— well, except where the red mark of what was sure to be a big bruise was blooming. “What’re you doing back there? Scared the devil outta me.”

“Sorry,” she muttered, and backed up as he returned to examining the Civic. 

“Leakin’ oil. That ain't good,” he muttered, as if to himself, and circled the car, walking back to the road about ten feet away. Rey followed him. “Yup, trail here. Mm. Did the car make a noise?”

“Yeah. It started… sputtering. And just died.” Rey screened her eyes from the sun. 

“How fast were you going?”

“Um, the limit,” she said defensively. “Why?”

“Looks like…” He circled back, looked at the engine, and mumbled to himself as he pulled a little flashlight from his jeans and flicked it on, peering into the dark mess. “Think you threw a rod,” he said finally, squinting down. “Through the oil pan. Punctured it.”

Well, at least she had a name for what was wrong. “Oh. Can it be fixed quickly?”

“Mm.” He wiped his forehead again, tugging the hat further on down to his eyebrows. “No. You’d have to pay someone more’n the car’s worth to get it fixed. Lost cause.”

“It was a rental,” said Rey, stunned. This could not be happening. “I rented it in Chicago.”

“Call ‘em.”

“I _can’t_. There’s no signal out here.”

He nodded. “Mm. I got WiFi at my place, if you need to use the signal to call.”

“I—” Rey felt like her chest was seizing up. This could not be happening, not to her, not _now._ Go back to this guy’s trailer or house or whatever, and use his internet to call a tow truck that would be useless because the car was unfixable. Maybe they’d bring a new car for her. She shoved her face into her hands and tried to breathe evenly. “Sorry. I— this is—”

“‘S all right.” He backed away a step and sat on the hood of the Civic, knees spread casually. “You take your time. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Thanks,” she managed, wiping her eyes. That was going to be the easiest option, right? It was almost five PM, which meant that she could call the toll-free number for roadside help, and someone would come get her. Someone had to. “I’ll go with you,” she said, “if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” he said, pushing off the hood and dusting his hands on his pants. 

“I just— I just realized I don’t know your name,” she said, floundering as he walked back to the truck and she followed.

“Ben,” he said, low and final. “Just Ben. Nothin’ else. Let’s go.”

* * *

Ben stopped at a gas station on the way to his place and bought her what he called a “pop” which she insisted on calling a “soda”. It was ice-cold and sweet and fizzy, and made her feel a little more energized, especially when she considered the fact she hadn’t eaten since nine AM at a truck stop McDonald’s. _So much for my pre-shoot fitness regimen being stuck to,_ she thought, gulping down the soda. The thing was probably full-sugar, too. Oh, well. She could stand to loosen up, especially for a couple of hours, or as long as it took them to get a tow truck out here. 

His “place” was a surprisingly well-kept prefabricated home (or maybe it could be called a doublewide trailer, she wasn't sure what the difference was) with white siding and a front deck, up which Rey stepped in her bare feet, unable to stand the goddamn boat shoes for another second. _I have my tetanus shots. I’ll be fine._ Ben took off his musty hat and held the screen door for her wordlessly. She stepped into a carpeted living area with a low sofa, an old TV, a coffee table, a kitchen to the left, and a single AC unit set into the window to the backyard. It was dingy, but blessedly cold inside, and Rey flexed her toes on the scratchy carpet as he crossed to the kitchen and squatted down by the sink, dragging something out from under it. “Sit, he said, nodding at the sofa as he stood and washed his hands.

Rey sat carefully. The sofa was firm under her, not squashy and collapsing in the middle like she’d expected. “What are you—”

He crossed over and sat on the coffee table with a first-aid kit, almost uncomfortably close to her. “Band-aids,” he said by way of explanation, and indicated her feet with a nod. Rey lifted her feet, wincing. Her pale pink pedicure had held up all right, but the backs of her feet were crusted with drying blood. “Here.” Ben wrapped his hand around her ankle carefully, and she froze. His hands were big enough to almost cover her whole foot, but he was gentle as he cleaned her stinging, open injuries with Neosporin and taped gauze pads to the back of her heels. “Password to the internet’s on the fridge,” he offered as he packed the kit back up and stood. “You want a beer?”

“Water, please,” said Rey, testing the flex of her feet against the tape. “You… live here by yourself?”

A noncommittal grunt was all she got in response from the broad back as the tap ran. Ben came back out and set the glass of water on the coffee table in front of her before he ducked his head and moseyed off to another room, and she eyed it with a bit of trepidation: who knew what was in the pipes out here? But she was thirsty, and slightly dehydrated, so she took it and gulped it down as fast as she could while she grabbed for her phone and hobbled into the kitchen to find the WiFi password, written in block letters on a magnetic whiteboard next to a magnet with a dog on it. _Network: 0kyLr3N. Password: 1138HS*._ She tapped her settings and connected, noting her low battery and wishing she’d grabbed a charging cable before she dialed the 1-800 number for the towing service.

_“This is Millennium Rent-a-car, this is Rose, how can I help you?”_

“Uh, hi. I rented a car in Chicago earlier this week and I— I threw a rod in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. I need a tow and a replacement car.” Rey shifted the phone to rest under her chin as she grabbed for a pen out of the jar on the kitchen counter: it was branded with the name of some local church. “My name’s Niima, Rey Niima, that’s two i’s in Niima.”

_“ _Re_ y Niima? Okay, where are you?” _

“I’m in this little town of like a hundred people, called Kirby? No idea where, exactly.”

_“ _Ri_ ght. Hold, please.” _ Tinny music began to play, and Rey sighed, drumming her fingers on the Formica countertop. _Please just get me a ride,_ she thought desperately. She could hear Ben moving things around in another room down the hall, and wondered what he was doing.

The line picked back up. _“_ __U_ m, okay. I’m so sorry, Miss Niima, but that’s super out of the way from the interstate, and all our trucks in the area are backlogged till Thursday, so the earliest we could get a tow truck out to you would be… Thursday morning.” _

Rey’s heart sank. “It’s _Monday_. Are you kidding me? I have to be in New York by Friday.”

For what it was worth, Rose sounded extremely apologetic. _“Again, I’m so sorry. Do you have a place to stay until we can get to you? Are you safe?”_

“Yes,” she answered, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Yes, I’m fine. Thursday morning, you said?” _What am I going to do?_

_“ _Y_ es, around nine. I’ll see if we can offer you a refund for the remainder of the rental. Again, Miss Niima, I am so—” _

“I know, I know, you’re sorry,” snapped Rey, irritable. Her feet hurt like hell, but as Ben’s broad form appeared in the little hall, eyebrows raised, she felt suddenly ashamed of herself. It wasn’t Rose’s fault she was stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to take a deep breath as she turned away from Ben’s even, dark gaze. “I know this isn’t your fault. Thank you for trying.”

_“ _O_ h, _ ” said Rose, sounding taken aback. _“_ __I_ — sure, Miss Niima. Have a nice night, okay? We’ll do our best and call you if any changes happen.” _

Rey hung up and put the phone down. “They can’t get a truck out here until Thursday,” she said, trying not to sound bleak. “I really don’t want to be an imposition.”

“Mm,” he said, shaking his head, which she took to mean that no, she wasn’t being an imposition. “Figured. Made up the bed.”

“The… oh.” Rey swallowed. Of course there was only one bedroom, and of course it was his. “You sure? I don’t want to kick you out of your own— I can take the couch.”

His eyebrows drew down slightly. “I ain’t making a guest sleep on the couch,” he said firmly, like that was the end of it. “You hungry? I’ll take you down to the diner.”

Her belly growled. “I… yeah. But I’m gonna— I can’t go out in those shoes again.”

Ben shuffled over to a closet, wordlessly rooted around in it, and pulled out a pair of shoes. They were beaten up Converse sneakers that had once been white, but had faded and stained over time to a dirty cream. “These oughta fit,” he said before he got up and moved back down the little hall to what she knew now was the bedroom door.

“Are these… my size?” she asked, amazed as she picked them up. He wasn’t listening, though— he was already digging around for socks in the bedroom. Rey turned them from side to side, examining the size. Men’s six, so a women’s eight: they’d fit her fine. Inside the right and left tongues, the name BEN SOLO was printed in careful, faded Sharpie. 

Rey was no expert, but she was pretty sure that a man Ben’s height hadn’t been a shoe size six since he was probably ten years old. So these must be his old shoes, shoes from when he was a kid. What kind of man kept his childhood shoes in his closet?

He came back out with the socks. “Might be too big,” he grunted, and handed them to her. She put them on over the gauze pads (at least they were clean) and shoved her feet into the shoes. Slightly big, but doable and comfortable, and Rey followed him to the door, still carrying her tote bag as they walked out to the pickup.

* * *

An hour later, Rey was crammed full of cornbread and pork tenderloin sandwich, and felt like she could sleep for a year. Ben had barely spoken a word throughout the meal, keeping his eyes mostly fixed on his plate, and he ate like it was a chore he had to get through extremely quickly, especially after the waitress, a fifty-something woman whose nametag read _Maz_ , said cheerfully, “Oh, Ben, nice to finally see you steppin’ out with a girl!” and he’d almost choked on his coffee while Rey had stammered her way through an explanation of the broken down car.

Now, Rey followed him back to the truck in the dusk and climbed back up into the cab, trying to discreetly burp behind her hand. She hadn’t eaten this much in months. Pre-shoot workout routines were a bitch, and she hadn’t even had carbs in two weeks. 

“You can use the shower,” he said abruptly, settling into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. “Second door in the hall.”

“Thanks,” she said, swiping her iPhone open. “Oh, shit. I— my battery’s dead, and I forgot to call my agent. Do you have a charge cable at the house?”

“Might,” he said, shrugging. “I’ll look.” 

The ride back lapsed into silence. Not an uncomfortable silence, just… silence, calm and peaceful, and Rey looked out the window at the shabby little town in the twilight.

* * *

She stripped off her filthy clothes and took a shower in the one bathroom, scrubbing herself from head to toe with the only thing Ben had available— a single brick of green, marbled Irish Spring soap, which she _knew_ was going to wreck her hair, she knew it, and yet wrecked dry hair would be better than the greasy sweaty mess she had on her head after a day like this. 

Rey stepped out on the mat and dried off, eyeing the clothes he’d given her: one men’s olive drab T-shirt, size large, branded with the letters USMC; one pair of olive colored silky shorts, branded similarly, also a size large, probably big enough to fall off her hips. _Better than sleeping naked,_ she thought, and pulled the shirt on over her head. The neckline was wide enough to almost fall off her shoulder. The shorts were not going to be an option at all unless she wanted to drop trou in front of Ben, but the shirt was long enough to almost reach the middle of her thighs, so she balled up the shorts and made her way into the hall, carrying her dirty clothes in the other hand.

“I’ll wash ‘em,” he said from the living room, jerking up off the couch in a single quick movement. His eyes flickered down to her bare thighs.“Shorts too big?”

“Yeah,” said Rey, uncomfortably trying to pull the hem of the shirt down further. “Maybe it’s a good thing you gave me the bed. Wouldn’t want you to, um, come out here in the morning and be flashed.” She offered a smile.

Ben’s eyes narrowed to the very slightest degree, and his lips twitched under the scraggly mustache. “Mm,” he grunted, and took her clothes: blouse, shorts, bra, underwear.

Rey remembered something. “Oh, wait. You can’t wash the blouse in a machine, it’s silk. It has to be dry-cleaned.”

“Dry-cleaned,” he repeated, brows drawing down. “Closest dry-cleaner’s in Kokomo. Fifty miles.”

“Oh,” said Rey, sighing. “Okay. Just… then just don’t worry about it. Everything else can be washed just fine.”

“Mm.” He made his way to the kitchen, where he slid open a folding door to reveal two rickety looking machines: washer and dryer. “You get some sleep, ma’am.”

Rey fought a cracking yawn and headed back to his bedroom, feet padding over the scratchy carpet. “Okay. Night, Ben.”

The bedroom had two windows: one in the back wall and one on the side that the AC unit was stuffed into, blasting frigid air into the room. It was small, but neat (maybe he’d been cleaning in here earlier) with a full-size bed made up with light blue sheets and a quilt, a quilt that looked homemade and old. At the foot was a folded-up army-style blanket, olive drab wool and very scratchy. He had a closet, too, and an old dresser, and a couple of cardboard boxes stacked along the wall. Curious, Rey opened one of the boxes, knowing she probably shouldn’t pry into people’s personal stuff, but…

Inside was a pile of camouflage-print uniforms, all bearing the nametape SOLO over the right side of the chest, all stuffed down in an unfolded heap, as if someone had shoved them in here in a hurry. One of the dusty jackets— shirts? Rey didn’t know what they were called, exactly— still bore a dusty, Velcro-backed patch on the left shoulder, a black patch with a red symbol kind of like a spear in the middle and the words REN’S KNIGHTS underneath it. She turned it over to look at the right side, and there was a big, dark, stiff stain on the collar, spreading down to the shoulder and chest. 

_That’s blood,_ she thought, without really thinking. _Definitely blood._ A prickle went up her spine as she really thought about that for a moment: the scar on his face. Had this been…. _that_? Rey set the stained jacket aside and looked down into the box, and saw a glint of metal. _Well, no sense in ignoring it._ She reached down and pulled out a black leather box edged in silver. It was long, about the length of her hand, and she cracked it open to see a bronze medal on a navy blue ribbon with a silver stripe through the center of it, a medal shaped like a cross with a ship in the middle. _What the hell is this?_

A creaky step outside alerted her as to the fact that she was snooping, and Rey guiltily threw everything back into the box and closed it, scrambling up into Ben’s bed as he knocked gently on the door. “Ma’am?” he asked, muffled through the pressboard.

“Yeah?” she called, shoving her naked lower half down under the sheets. 

“Found you a charging cord for your phone.” He cracked the door and glanced down at her, and he must have decided she was decent, because he came in and set the white cord down on the nightstand by the bed. “Should have it charged up by morning. G’night.”

“What’s—” Rey floundered for a second. “What’s in those boxes?” she asked, pointing at the stack against the wall as if she hadn’t been looking through them two seconds ago.

His dark gaze swept over them, and it was like a cloud had suddenly settled over his face. Both eyes narrowed and his mouth worked for a moment, a muscle in his cheek flickering. “Nothin’. Bunch of old shit. Leave it alone.”

Rey reflected that she’d never heard him curse to her face before as he left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. She hesitated for a moment, then plugged her phone into the wall outlet, waiting until the screen said CHARGING before rolling over, turning out the light, and going to sleep.


	2. sugar and salt

Morning came slowly, as Rey’s eyes fluttered open and the sunlight came filtering through the rickety blinds of the bedroom window, drenching her the sensations of warmth on her arms, dust motes floating sleepily in the beams, and soft, rhythmic grunting coming from behind the bedroom wall.

_ Wait. What? _

Rey sat up, rubbing her eyes, and listened more intently before covering her eyes in secondhand embarrassment. Yeah, so, the walls in this home were thin as paper, and that was definitely,  _ definitely _ the sound of someone masturbating in the bathroom. Since it was Ben’s house, it could only be Ben, and Rey lay on her back, crimson to her neck with her hands clapped over her mouth, pretending she couldn’t hear him.  Even worse, the soda from the previous day had apparently worked its way through her system, and she had to pee,  _ really bad,  _ and there was only one toilet. And Ben was in there. And it didn’t… exactly sound like he would be done anytime soon. Rey shuffled out of bed as quietly as she could, disconnecting the phone from the charger, and was happy to see she had a full charge.  Ben was groaning now, his breath coming in hitching gasps from behind the wall, and Rey pressed her lips into a line while she squeezed her thighs together.  _ Please finish up, _ she thought frantically,  _ please, dude, I have to pee so bad. Oh my god. If he’s not done in a minute I’m gonna make some noise. _

Rey checked her Instagram while she waited, just for something to distract her from the sounds. Eight million followers were still there, all seemed good. DMs were full, which she’d get around to today if she had time, and her email was packed, too. She shot off a quick message to her agent:  _ Hey, Amilyn! So sorry but I ran into some car trouble on the way to NYC. Won’t get there till maybe Saturday. Please let everyone know I’m fine and I’ll be there asap. Don’t worry about me. Rey.  _ She pressed send. That was taken care of. From the sounds behind the wall, though, it appeared not everything was being handled quickly. A muffled, low word that might have been a curse spilled out from the grunting, and something heavy hit something else. What was going  _ on _ in there? Had he accidentally torn something off the wall?

“Hello?” called Rey, and the noises stopped instantly. “Did— are you okay, Ben?”

Silence met her ears. Complete silence. Rey got out of bed and went to the door, opening it just as he opened the bathroom door, and they were so close to each other that she almost ran into him. He was fresh and clean from a shower, wearing gym shorts and a shirt; his hair hung in lank dark strands, and a flush still burned his cheeks. “Mornin’,” he said evenly, blinking at her. 

“I— morning,” she echoed, lost. He was so tall that her head just came to his shoulder, his damp black Bob Dylan T-shirt straining to contain his thick biceps. Rey noted there was a cluster of moles just above his left elbow, almost like the Pleiades, or— “I heard a crash. Is everything okay?”

“Fine,” he answered, ducking his head and rubbing the end of his big nose. “Just fine. You— you want breakfast? Your things are dry. I’ll put ‘em on the bed.”

“Oh. Yes. I just, I, I have to pee, so—”

“Oh,” he said, and attempted to awkwardly scoot around her as she tried to both get the door to the bedroom shut and move past him. The doors were too close together, and Rey stepped on Ben’s foot, then fell into him, pitching forward as she tried to avoid the swinging door. He caught her before she slammed her head into the door frame, but not fast enough to stop the bottom of the T-shirt from riding up in his hands and exposing her ass to the air. 

“Jesus,” she spluttered, wriggling out of his loosening grip and tugging the shirt back down. She couldn’t even look at him. “Sorry, sorry, I’ll just—”

“You go on, now,” he said deferentially, slipping past her and making his escape to the kitchen. Rey shut the door behind her, eyes screwed shut as she buried her face in her palms. He probably thought she was an idiot, a dumb city girl born with a silver spoon in her mouth who didn’t know anything. 

It wasn’t like he could have possibly known that she’d come from pretty much nothing and worked her way to where she was with blood, sweat, and tears. She lifted her borrowed shirt and sat to pee, and after she’d washed her hands she looked in the mirror over the sink. Sunburn, pink and raw, was dancing over her freckled nose, which was just  _ great _ : She’d probably sweated off her sunscreen yesterday and now she was paying the price. Her tote only had her wallet and a light jacket in it, since it was supposed to be a twelve hour drive: she had nothing for even an overnight stay at all, no makeup, no hair products, nothing.

Well, it could be worse. She finger-combed her hair free of tangles and tied it into a bun, then splashed water on her face, wincing at the feeling of her tight, sunbaked skin. At least Ben hadn’t tried to, like, come into the bedroom and jerk off on her while she was sleeping or something. She could have gotten stuck with a serial killer or a sex pest or a pervert or a convicted felon or somebody, and instead she was staying with a very large, likely ex-military mechanic who just seemed quiet and jacked off in the bathroom like a normal man. Rey blew her nose and tossed the toilet paper into the empty garbage can.

Wait, empty? But hadn’t she heard— 

Rey paused, mulling this one over. There was no telltale wad of toilet paper in the can. Could he have flushed the evidence down the toilet? No, she hadn’t heard it flush, and he couldn’t have finished in his own shorts, that would be gross. Maybe he hadn’t been jerking off after all. Had he been doing situps? Pushups? No, there wasn’t nearly enough room in here for his big frame. Then where was...

_ You’re sitting in a trailer bathroom wondering where some random man’s jizz is, _ she thought, shaking her head.  _ Jesus Christ, Rey. Just go get dressed and find something else to do.  _

* * *

When she came out of his room, still in his T-shirt but wearing her shorts, Ben was hunched over the stove and the smell of eggs and sausage was thick in the hazy air. Coffee was brewing in an ancient machine, and Rey stepped onto the linoleum, watching. It was a far cry from her normal morning meals of steel-cut oats and avocado toast with a nonfat vanilla latte, but she wasn’t complaining. 

“Smells good,” she offered.

“Mm,” he said. “Mug’s in the cupboard.” His shaggy head jerked toward the line of pressboard cabinets over the sink. 

Rey went over and stood on her toes to reach a mug. It was white, with black stenciled letters on the outside: PRETTY GOOD CHANCE THERE’S WHISKEY IN HERE. She half-smiled at the tired joke and poured herself a cup, then mixed in some sugar and a little milk from the fridge. It was decent. Not great, but decent, and strong enough to get her awake. “Do you have to, uh, go to work?” she asked, for lack of anything else to talk about. 

“Hm?” He turned from the stove, blinking. “No. I do odd jobs... around.”

“Oh.” She sat at the counter, sipped her coffee again, and looked down at her phone. Amilyn had emailed her back, and promised to let everyone know about the situation.  _ Just a few more days and I’ll be sipping mimosas with my stylist team, laughing about this.  _

A plate slid beneath her nose, and she inhaled deeply: eggs, meat, spices. “Oh, that smells  _ amazing, _ ” she said brightly, looking up at Ben, who froze where he was standing, arm extended. “Thank you.”

He grunted again (really, did this guy have any other methods of communication?) and nodded quickly, withdrawing his hand and turning back to the stove. Rey let herself really look at him this time: bare, long-boned feet, pasty-white, thick legs dotted with freckles and dusted with dark hair, solid forearms that were several shades darker than his calves, and rounded, large ears that stuck out from under the damp locks on his head. He had an interesting face, too, one that several agents she knew would have killed to have on their team. Long, crooked, high-boned, and those  _ eyes _ … eyes so deeply hooded they looked almost triangular, big and brown and soft when they weren’t narrowed and glaring. Good brows, too, and an interesting cluster of beauty marks on his right cheek by his ear that the beard didn’t cover. With the right lighting, he could have looked like a Rembrandt painting. 

A very big, very sullen, very broad painting, capable of communicating in only grunts.

He got out a coffee mug for himself, this one with red letters that spelled out #1 DAD, and Rey immediately wondered— “That’s yours?” she blurted out, and wished she hadn’t at the look on his face.

“No. My old man’s. Why?”

“I just… thought maybe you, you were a dad,” she explained lamely. 

“Mm-mm,” he said roughly, pouring himself coffee. “He left it here after he passed. Got it for him when I was twelve.”

“I… I’m sorry,” Rey offered, cringing inwardly. “I didn’t mean to bring it up, if it’s something you—”

He shrugged, one shoulder lifting and falling like a mountain. “‘S nothin’. Cancer. Six years back. Lost Mom a year after that.” One thumb jabbed at the living room wall. “Got pictures. You can take a look if you like.”

Rey started in on her eggs, embarrassed, and shoveled food into her mouth so she didn’t have to respond. They both ate in silence.

* * *

Ben changed his clothes and retreated to the backyard after breakfast while Rey looked at the photos on the wall. There were Kodak glossy snaps in frames: a lanky preteen who could only be Ben from those ears and freckles, standing between a woman with his eyes who looked about five feet tall and a handsome middle-aged man with Ben’s full mouth, all three posing by a signpost for the Mississippi River in shorts and T-shirts. Next to that was another one of them at the Grand Canyon, with Ben looking exasperated, sunburned, and grouchy next to his laughing mother, who wore a sun visor and a fanny pack— his father must have taken that one— and one of a very young Ben smiling, showing big, flat front teeth too big for his mouth as he proudly showed the photographer a hamster in his carefully cupped hands.

So Ben had dead parents, too. Rey felt a stab of kinship with the sweet boy in the photos, and wondered what had happened to him, and if it had anything to do with those uniforms in that box in the bedroom— but she was suspecting that it probably did. 

* * *

Rey looked through the back windows and into the yard around noon. Ben had stripped down to a T-shirt, tied his long-sleeved button-up shirt around his waist, and was splitting wood in the yard.  He was good at it, too. Rey didn’t need to have a college degree in Lumberjack Arts to work out that he’d done this for a long time. Notch, set the wedge, and bring down a huge splitting maul in a clean arc from the ground to the log.  _ Whack. _ Two wedges of wood went tumbling off the stump. There was a shed out there, and a big fire pit, too, which was probably what the wood was for.

_ He’s probably thirsty.  _ Rey turned into the kitchen and started rummaging around. There was a packet of Lipton tea bags, and a bag of sugar in the pantry, and she at least knew how to make sweet tea from an old blog post she remembered reading. Six cups of water, boiled… She got out a pot and turned the stove on, filling it with water. This, at least, was easy.  The water boiled, and she carefully put six teabags in and lifted it off to a potholder, letting it brew while she measured out the sugar. Ben was still rhythmically pounding away outside,  _ whack, whack, whack,  _ wood splintering and splitting audible through the walls. 

Into the pot went the sugar, dissolving into the tea, and Rey taste-tested it. Good and sweet and probably terrible for her, so she was sure someone who seemed to subsist on greasy diner food and full-sugar soda would like it just fine. She carefully dumped it into a big plastic pitcher she found, added ice from the tray in the fridge, stirred it up until it was cold, and grabbed a plastic cup from the cupboard. He’d been out there for hours by now.

“Hey!” she called, stepping out barefoot onto the back deck, pitcher in one hand and cup in the other. 

Ben jerked mid-swing, redirected the maul, and brought it down thumping into the dirt. “Jesus Christ,” he said, staggering where he stood in his sweat-soaked white shirt and dirty Wranglers. “What—”

“I made you, uh, iced tea,” she managed, frozen. Shit, she should have warned him. He could have whacked his foot off. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. Figured you might be thirsty.”

He drew his arm across his forehead and tossed the maul down into the grass, striding over to the deck in his dirty work boots. Rey preemptively poured him a cup and handed it over the rail down to him like a peace-offering. He eyed it and her, then sipped it carefully. 

Rey waited for the verdict. Ben’s eyebrows raised a little, and he tipped the whole cup back, gulping down the cold sweet tea in one breath. His pale throat moved above the neck of his T-shirt, thick as he swallowed, and Rey had to tear her eyes away from it for a second.  _ He’s filthy and barely talks to you,  _ she reminded herself, thankful that the sun in her eyes gave her an excuse to squint and look at the deck.

“‘S good,” he mumbled, handing her the cup back. “Where’d you learn to make real sweet tea?”

A _compliment?_ A miracle. “Um, the Internet.”

He let out a couple of huffs of air through his nose that might have been laughs if he’d done them any harder, and the corners of his eyes creased into wrinkles. “The Internet. Mm.”

He was  _ laughing _ at her, after she’d tried to do something nice for him. Laughing at her! Rey felt horribly stung, hurt, wounded. “It’s not like we all grew up with parents who taught us how to  _ cook _ and— and do shit _ , _ ” she snapped, and his eyes went wide, staring up into hers over the railing of the deck, but she was mad: she was stressed and she was going to miss her shoot and that meant wasted money and lost time. She’d never been this out of her element before, not ever; standing barefoot on a plywood deck while cicadas buzzed in the summer heat and a mountain of a man she’d have to spend the next few days with who  _ laughed at her  _ was not her idea of a fun time. Rey found to her shock that there were tears gathering in her hot, dry eyes, and she hated crying in front of strangers: this was humiliating. “Forget it,” she choked out, and slammed the pitcher down on the back table. “I’m w-walking back to the Civic. Nice knowing you.”

And without even waiting for Ben’s expression to change, Rey turned on her heel and stormed indoors, grabbing her tote out of the bedroom as tears blurred her vision. She snatched up her dirty blouse, shoving it deep into the bag as she fled the front door and began to run, still barefoot, down the road.

* * *

It was almost one in the afternoon when she heard the gray F-250 ambling on down behind her, as slow and careful as its owner’s speech. Rey’s feet were beat to shit: caked in dust, bleeding, and probably burned on the bottom from the way they felt. She knew she had to be getting an even worse sunburn, but her pride wouldn’t let her look back over her shoulder.  _ Leave me alone, _ she thought fiercely, shouldering her tote higher on her aching arm, pretending she hadn’t been standing in the road for an hour crying because her feet hurt too much to walk anymore.

The truck rolled up alongside her and came to a halt. She refused to look up, even when the driver’s door clicked open heavily and shut with a bang, or when boots crunched over the thick gravel, coming towards her. “You plannin’ to stay out here all night?” asked a low, even drawl she knew well by now.

“Yeah,” she said thinly, wiping her wet eye with the heel of her hand and staring off into the distance. Cornfields, golden and green and waving in the wind, a pale blue summer sky as far as the eye could see. “Thought I’d get a new job as a scarecrow and stand in a field.”

“Mm,” said Ben. “Well, if you get tired of that, I got an ice pack in the truck.”

_ Ice pack _ . Her feet were hurting so goddamn bad. Rey broke and turned to him, her lower lip trembling as she tried to hold back the tears. “I shouldn’t have said that about your parents,” she choked. “I’m s-sorry.”

“No harm done,” he said. He’d changed his clothes to a dark gray T-shirt and a black-and-white checked flannel, and clean jeans, and that made her feel weird: had he showered before he’d found her out here? “C’mon, now. I’ll get you into the cab.” 

“I can’t walk, it hurts,” she started to mutter, ashamed, but he didn’t seem to care, and before she knew what was happening she was swept up off the hot gravel like a load of hay, a pair of arms as thick as oak beams cradling her in a bridal carry. Rey stiffened: nobody had ever held her like this in her life, and she opened her mouth to protest, but thought better of it as he easily plodded to the passenger side and opened the door, settling her into the seat. 

The promised ice pack was waiting on the center console. Rey picked it up and put it on the floor, resting her feet on it as Ben shut the door and rounded the cab to the driver’s side, and cold relief soaked through her soles. He also had a Styrofoam cup of water waiting in her cupholder, a straw angled carefully toward her seat, and Rey picked it up clumsily, sucking at the plastic tube. Water, ice-cold and clean, filled her mouth, and she closed her eyes, gulping it down as Ben got in and shut the door, starting the engine up. “Thank you,” she managed, wiping her lips. 

He didn’t answer, just buckled his seatbelt and started to drive, swinging in a wide circle to head back toward town. It wasn’t until they were back inside the limits that he turned his head slightly and said, “The only thing my folks wanted outta me was more’n they ever did, and it—” He sighed, harsh and loud through his nose. “It didn’t turn out like they wanted.”

Well, that was cryptic, but it was a start. Rey rested her head against the air-conditioned, cold glass of the window. “I lost mine when I was four,” she said, not even bothering to put inflection into her voice. “Got shuffled around in the system until Amilyn found me. My agent. I was… god, what, sixteen, and trying to cross the street in Manhattan to get to the Metro for my second job, and she handed me her card and said I had the right look for her agency and—” her throat seized up. 

She hadn’t thought about that day in a long time: sixteen years old, wearing acid-washed skinny jeans and an oversized T-shirt, and it had been hot that day, like this day was hot— but New York hot smelled like city streets and metal, and Indiana hot smelled like baking grass and corn. Amilyn had been wearing a pastel pantsuit, smiling, hair perfectly done, makeup flawless.  _ And I thought it was a prank, a joke, and then I took the leap and called her…  _ A tear slid down Rey's cheek. “She saw me as a good thing, you know, and not— not as an annoying foster kid, or a minimum wage worker, or someone to be shit on and laughed at all the time. Not a joke. Someone who could do something.”

Ben was very quiet. He was quiet until they pulled into the driveway, and quiet as he came around to her side and picked her up out of the cab; silent as he carried her up the steps of the deck and opened the door and set her on the sofa, said nothing as he went to the kitchen and got the first aid kit again. 

He finally spoke after he’d sat on the coffee table, cleaned out the cuts on her feet, pulled out the goatheads, bandaged her up, and set another ice pack on them. “I shouldn’t’ve laughed at you, then, ma’am,” he said, low and rough, his eyes fixed directly on hers. “I’m sorry.”

Rey looked up into his eyes, and thought for a stunned moment,  _ oh, they’re not dark at all, they’re more like hazel, bright, with a little dark ring around the pupils  _ before she caught herself and remembered to say something. “It’s fine. You— you didn’t know that was a sore spot.”

“Don’t matter. Still rude.” His thumb traced lightly over her ankle, and Rey… didn’t mind it, actually. Not as much as she might have a day ago, back when she hadn’t slept in his bed or realized that he was the kind of person who would think to bring a runaway barefoot guest water and ice in his truck— but Ben seemed to suddenly realize what his hands were doing, and pulled them away with an almost apologetic duck of his head as he stood and went back to the kitchen for more water. 

“Did you get all that wood chopped?” she asked, for lack of anything else to ask him.

“Nah.” He came back in, set the glass down for her, and retreated back to the counter, leaning carefully against it and crossing his arms. “It’s just somethin’ to do when I don’t have anything lined up. Keeps me busy.”

“When you’re not chasing cows?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood.

“Mm,” he said, and gave her a half-smile, the most she’d gotten out of him so far. “Don’t really need to work, not these days.”

“Oh. Your parents, um, left you something?”

His brows drew down. “Just the house. No, I got a monthly check. Compensation.”

Rey swallowed, feeling like she maybe knew the answer, but asked anyway. “For what?”

Ben looked away, silent. He shifted his weight, went back into the kitchen, and started rummaging through the fridge. “You hungry?” he called back out to her.

Truth be told, she could have eaten, but she wasn't that hungry. “Not yet. Thanks.”

He grunted in assent from the linoleum, and popped a frozen meal into the microwave. As it hummed, Rey looked at the back of his shaggy dark head.

She’d never felt this… weirdly interested in anyone before. When was the last time any man had apologized to her for anything? When was the last time anyone had insisted on calling her  _ ma’am _ , for that matter, or cared about her feet hurting? Even Amilyn, who Rey had come to regard as a near-parental figure, always said that pain was often required for perfection in print. Rey remembered shoots in heels so awful that she bled, dresses so delicate that she had to stand absolutely still and barely breathe because she might tear the fabric, the diets and water cuts and saunas required to look  _ perfect _ , and this Ben guy… he didn’t care that she was sweaty or oily or that her hair was a wreck or that she was probably going to get zits from eating all that diner food. 

He… cared. In a quiet, grouchy, guarded kind of way, but he’d cared enough to track her down and bring her back home. She wasn’t hungry for food, no; she was hungry for Ben. She wanted to take him apart piece by piece, to get into his skin, burrow into his brain and figure out what the hell his story was, to find that beaming boy in the photos who seemed about as far from this terse giant as she was from New York City. 

“What happened to your face?” she blurted out, and clapped her hand over her mouth in shock at her own rudeness as Ben froze into stillness in the kitchen, then turned slowly, eyes trained on her as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “I— I am _ so _ —”

But he didn’t interrupt, or snap, or speak at all. He just started… slowly  _ advancing _ on her, focusing directly on her face, and Rey’s heart about jumped into her throat as he loomed closer and closer and finally he was leaning over her, over the couch, both hands planted on the back of the sofa, bracketing her face as he leaned in, offering her a very good look at the scar that ran from eyebrow to jaw. She’d had plenty of time to scurry away, and somehow she thought he would have let her go if she’d done it, but he was  _ so close _ , dizzyingly close, and smelled like Irish Spring soap and leather and flannel. “It was a knife,” he growled. “Afghanistan. Two thousand nine. The man who did it is rottin’ in some grave in the fuckin’ desert. That what you wanted to hear?”

Her mouth was so fucking dry. “I’m s-sorry, Ben, I didn’t mean to—”

Ben’s eyes were almost black in the shadow under his hair, and his voice dropped down to match. “Yeah?  _ Didn’t mean to? _ What’re you gonna tell me next? I’ve heard it all. You’re a hero, you’re a badass— and the other shit, too, from the other side: I’m a drain on the system, party to war crimes, a piece of shit imperialist whatever. So go ahead. Say somethin’. You’re so full of surprises: showin’ up runnin’ around bleedin’ all over town, hollerin’ at me, makin’ me sweet tea, runnin’ off again. Go on. Surprise me.”

Rey sucked in a breath. “So you do know how to talk,” she said, trembling, a foot away from his hunched-over body as she stared into his eyes. 

Ben didn’t move. His eyes twitched, very subtly, and his mouth worked a little. “Hm. Can sure say I’ve never heard that one.”

“I don’t think you’re a hero. I don’t think anybody’s a hero. Not for anything.” Rey struggled to collect her thoughts. “But you’re not a war criminal either. You’re— if this is where you grew up, I can understand why you’d join the military.”

“You don’t know what happened,” he said, still six inches from her face, eyes flickering back and forth between hers. “You don’t  know  what I did.”

“I sure don’t,” said Rey, trying to remember how to breathe. “But if you want to tell me—”

“Bullshit,” he said abruptly, jerking himself away from her and pacing around the room for a minute before turning around and jabbing a thick finger towards her. “Bull _shit_ , because you’re some famous model, and I— I know how this’ll go. You post about me on your social media, or wherever, and next thing I know I have the news knocking down my door asking about my  _ story, _ like I have something valuable locked in a box to show everyone in the world and wear on my sleeve.”

“I would never do that,” said Rey, hands shaking. “Not in—”

Ben scoffed. “Oh, sure you wouldn’t. You people gotta have attention like air. Can’t live away from a phone for a week—”

She didn’t know why she did it. She wasn’t even really conscious of her hands moving, or her thought process, or anything aside from Ben’s accusing tone and guarded eyes as she reached into her bag, pulled out her iPhone, and flung it across the room. The glass face smashed into the edge of the countertop. Ben jerked back in shock as the screen shattered, the phone unusable as it clattered to the floor, a miasma of glittering pixels clustered at the shatterpoints trying valiantly to still show the time: 1:57 PM. 

“Let me be clear,” said Rey evenly in a tone normally reserved for asshole photographers, her heart pounding as she stared at Ben, who was regarding her with an expression that was either horrified, incredulous or a mix of both: his face was hard to read. “I don’t need shit.” He blinked. She continued, a little heartened by his blank stare. “I think if I’m gonna be in a man’s house for three days waiting on a tow truck I at  _ least _ have the right to make conversation, especially if I wake up to the sound of him jerking off in the  _ bathroom _ .”

Ben’s face went deep, solid red, all the way to his ears. “I apologize,” he managed, voice thick and stilted. “Thought maybe it was the better choice, since the livin’ room’s wide open with no privacy.”

“Yeah, well, the walls are about as thin as paper,” Rey said, heat flooding her face. 

“I wasn’t— it wasn’t—” He seemed completely flustered, torn between an explanation and possibly even more embarrassment. “I don’t— that ain’t a normal morning thing. It won’t happen again.”

“Thanks,” she said, averting her eyes to the wreck of her phone. The microwave beeped in the kitchen, and Ben shuffled off as if to escape.

_ Aw, shit. Amilyn’s gonna kill me. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Y'all have goatheads where you are? Those fuckers hurt. Big sharp pointy burrs that will fuck you UP even though shoes sometimes, Rey honey what are you DOING without SHOES


	3. delineated

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we get a little heavier in this one so cw for suicide mention, graphic violence, and addiction mention!

Rey jerked up out of a sound sleep, the AC unit humming away over her head. That hadn’t woken her up. What the hell time was it? She reached for her phone automatically, then remembered it was broken, and remembered yesterday: her feet still hurt like hell, because the ibuprofen Ben had given her had probably worn off by now.

There was that noise again. Rey sat straight up in the dark and switched on the bedside lamp, flooding the little bedroom in a soft yellow glow. It had been some kind of shout, or a muffled yell. Had someone broken in? She swung her legs out of bed, wincing in pain as she stood. Her pajamas consisted of a pair of Ben’s old boxer shorts and another brown T-shirt. He seemed to have a ton of them laying around. Quickly, Rey limped to the door, listening. She could hear another low sound, drawn-out and loud enough to hear over the AC.  _ What the hell, _ she thought, baffled, and opened the door. “Ben?” she whispered softly, to the darkness of the short hall and the black, yawning living room beyond. 

Something was moving, fabric on fabric jerking in short, sharp, uneven movements to the sound of grunting, hoarse and strained. Someone was  _ fighting _ out there, and Rey’s heart jumped into her throat. Who would break into a house out in the middle of nowhere? To steal something? 

She had nothing to defend herself with in the slightest, and she didn’t care. Rey darted down the hall, her stomach winding itself into knots as she became disoriented in the dark and crashed into the coffee table what sounded mere inches from the fight, banging her knee. “ _ Jesus! _ ” she gasped.  A cry burst from the sofa, and Rey fumbled around, ignoring the stabbing pain in her leg to find the lamp she knew was on the end table and click it on. 

Light flooded the living room, warm and incandescent. It illuminated Ben, tangled up to his throat in an army blanket, thrashing on the sofa. His eyes were half-open, his mouth pulled back tight in a grimace over his teeth, and he was jerking wildly, panting. “No,” he said, snapping his head to the side. “No, no, no. Don’t.”

“Ben?” Rey rubbed her aching knee. 

He didn’t seem to hear her, or even be aware that she was in the room, and that was when she realized that his jaw was locked so tightly that every muscle in his cheeks stood out, his hair damp with sweat in the cool room. “Down, down,” he grunted through his teeth, “get— cover, get— Ash. Ash,  _ down _ —”

Rey’s brain ground to a halt. She had no idea what she should do. Try to wake him up? People did that in films all the time, but she didn’t have her phone available to look it up:  _ what do you do when someone’s having a nightmare _ ? Maybe that wasn’t right, kind of like how on TV when people did CPR they never locked their elbows because pressing down with locked elbows could kill someone. She settled for backing up, retreating to the counter, and just waiting, watching him. Maybe he’d go back to sleep. Maybe he’d forget all about the dream.

With a hoarse shout, one bare, pale arm swinging free of the blanket, Ben lashed out in his sleep and fell off the sofa, hitting the carpet with a heavy thud. One kicking leg banged into the coffee table, which toppled over onto the floor, and he jerked to a sitting position with a scream, the blanket slipping down off his shoulders as he raised his forearms to shield his face, then lapsed into silence, trembling. 

So much for forgetting about it.

Rey’s mouth was dry. His body was thickly built, solid and broad and pale, but that wasn’t what she was focused on— his left shoulder bore a huge pucker of twisted, discolored scar tissue, and she could see that the scar running through his face continued on down to his throat, his collarbone, and his chest, where it almost bisected his nipple before ending.

_ You don’t know what happened. You don’t know what I did.  _

“Ben,” she whispered, trying to sound reassuring and not terrified. “Hey. Are you awake?”

His arms were still shaking where they shielded his face. “Turn th’ light off,” he croaked, sounding ragged.

“Okay. I’ll turn the one in the kitchen on.” Rey made her way to the kitchen, flicked on the light above the stove, and went back out into the living room, switching off the table lamp with hands that definitely were not shaking. Ben remained where he was, face buried in his forearms, hands tangled into his hair as he took deep, shaky breaths. “You want… a drink? Water?”

There was a silence, and then a quiet “yeah,” came muffled from between the thick forearms.

Rey scurried back to the kitchen and filled a glass at the tap, then brought it back to the living area, pulling the table back up to its legs and setting the cup on it. “There,” she said, and squatted down beside him. “You— you’ve got a big mark on your shin where you smacked it. I’ll get you ice.” And he did; a massive red mark was blooming up his pale shin. 

“Don’t bother,” he said, lowering his arms and looking away from her. His face was as unreadable as ever, but his eyes were shining and wet. One big hand roughly dragged over his eyes, and the gleam was gone, leaving them dull and dark. “Go back to bed. ’M sorry I woke you.”

“Ah-ah,” said Rey, shaking her head. Here, then, was a chance to at least  _ try _ to repay the kindness he’d shown her. She tried to sound cheerful, as if wandering into living rooms in the dead of night while her host was having a blatant night terror was something that happened to her all the time. “You fixed up my blisters, so I’ll fix up your leg. Then we’ll be a little bit even, right?”

“Leave it be,” he snapped, uncharacteristically brittle-sounding. “I said go back to bed.”

She sat back on her heels, ignoring the pain in her feet. “And I said I’m getting you ice.” It wasn’t like she’d sat there and asked him to tell her about his nightmare in graphic detail: why was he being so fucking prickly? 

“I  _ said _ —” Ben jerked up clumsily, the blanket falling to his lap where he clutched it with one hand tightly to his body, and she could see his full torso now, down to the navel, and a massive crater of discolored, wrinkled scarring on the left side of his stomach, over his ribs. “Leave me  _ alone _ ,” he spit through clenched teeth, his hair in his eyes as he glared at her. 

“Fine!” she snapped, getting to her feet. “If it bruises, don’t blame me!” She stepped wrong on her foot as she marched past him, a shock of pain from a burst blister stabbing through her heel, and yelped as she stumbled onto one foot, hopping and caught off guard. Ben dropped the blanket and gripped her by the elbow to steady her on instinct, and as she fell into his solid, broad body, clad only in a pair of dingy old boxer-briefs, she became very,  _ very  _ aware that his body was not the only solid, large thing she was pressed against. 

“Jesus—” Ben let out a flustered little grunt and let go of her. “Go on, now. Back to sleep.”

Rey’s cheeks were burning. What was this guy’s  _ deal? _ First jacking off in the bathroom where she could hear, now this?  _ He knows who you are, _ her brain whispered suddenly.  _ He knew you from that shoot in Vogue.  _ Terror spiked through her suddenly: thoughts of kidnapping, thoughts of drugged food— an image of the F-250 roaring her down as she made her escape— 

She stumbled back against the countertop, her fingers curling around the first thing that came to her hand: a kitchen knife. “Get the _fuck_ _away_ from me,” she gasped, pointing it at him.

Ben looked like he might vomit. “Rey,” he said, ashen, and she noted with some disinterest that this was the first time he’d ever used her name to her face. “Put that down.” He held his hands out, up, palms facing her as he slid into a defensive, balanced stance: feet apart, head slightly down. It could have been funny juxtaposed with his erection straining through his boxer-briefs. It wasn’t. 

“Do you— you—” Rey couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe as her hand shook, holding the knife. “You have some fucking magazine of me, somewhere? Huh? With my f-face cut out or something, you jerk off to it, you, you’re some k-kind of stalker, some—”

“What?” he asked, completely taken aback. “I don’t— I don’t have the faintest idea what you mean—”

“You knew me, knew me from Vogue,” she choked, trying to stop herself from crying again. It wasn’t working. “And you j-jerked off in the fucking bathroom when _you knew_ the walls were thin. What’s your problem, huh? Some kind of, of, what, you get off on knowing people can hear you? Are you _hard_ right now because you knew I could _hear?”_

He took a step closer, eyeing her warily. “That ain’t what—”

“Oh, bullshit! Bull  _ shit, _ Ben, if that’s even your name—” Rey emphasized her words with a jab of the knife, pointed in his direction, and too late realized that maybe this wasn’t the best idea.

The only warning she got was a flicker of muscle under an eye. In a series of brutal, forceful movements, Rey found herself in short order bereft of her knife, which clattered to the linoleum, pinned to Ben’s chest with her neck trapped in the crook of his elbow, scrabbling at his biceps, and toppling over sideways until they fell to the carpet together, Ben’s body curled around hers, huge and firm, and his hands shook ever so slightly. He wasn’t choking her, just holding her firmly, and she tried to elbow him in the gut, to no avail: his abdominal muscles were like iron. 

“Do. Not. Wave. A. Knife. In. My. Goddamn. Face. Ever. Again.” His voice was like ink, black and thick and coating her whole world, and she could only nod, ashamed: she hadn’t even  _ thought _ —

“Yes. No. I won’t. I’m sorry.”

“If I let go of you,” he continued, very low into her ear as if she was a runaway farm animal, “are you gonna run for the knife?”

“No,” she said, hands still locked onto his arm. His dick was still very firm, and very much present pressing into her lower back, and she was paralyzed with the knowledge that this man was very much large and strong enough to do exactly whatever the fuck he wanted to do to her, and she’d be powerless to stop it.

“Are you gonna run for the door? ‘Cause if you’re gonna run for the door, I’m gonna have to get up and put pants on to go 'n chase you down again, and I don’t wanna do that, ‘cause it’s one in the goddamn morning. You gonna do that?”

“No,” Rey forced out, giving up trying to budge his arm. 

“Now,” he continued, as if they were having a perfectly reasonable conversation, “if you’d like to sit in my livin’ room and hurl some more wild accusations at me of bein’ a sex pest who gets off on god-knows-what, we can arrange that. Can’t promise I can give you a satisfactory defense without embarrassin’ the hell outta myself and gettin’ real personal, but I suppose since I’ve already seen your backside without no drawers and you’ve already as good as seen my, uh, Biblical shame, shall we say, we might as well get personal. Is that what you want?”

Rey’s hair was in her face, and she couldn’t move it. She blew a hank of brown hair out of her eyes. “I want—” She tried again. Her thoughts beat a frenzied staccato in her brain like panicked birds. “Ren’s Knights,” she managed, and his arm went even tighter across her throat. “Who— I want to know what happened to you.”

“That’s none of your business,” he snarled into her ear, low and close. His hands were shaking harder, the vibration escalating. "Did you go through _my stuff,_ you little _wildcat—_ "

“It damn well is my business now, because you’re choking me out on a fucking floor!” Rey snapped back.

“I ain’t choking you,” he answered, voice tightly controlled. “I’m restraining you. There’s a difference. If you’d like me to illustrate it, I’ll gladly demonstrate and choke you all you like, ma’am.”

_ Ohhhh god oh god oh god.  _ Against every single one of her logical brain cells, her body was reacting, and not in a good way, either; not in the normal reaction someone might have when a man twice their fucking weight threatens to do bodily harm. “N-no,” she squeaked, biting her lower lip, unable to hide the blood rushing to her face and praying he couldn’t see. 

“Good.” He released her, and she felt the absence of his body instantly, like having a blanket yanked off her body in a cold room. “Get up.”

Rey took a breath and weighed her options. “Tell me about that, then,” she said, still lying on the scratchy carpet as she pointed at his general upper half. 

Ben’s eyes narrowed. “Go to bed.”

She frowned and sat up. “Not even one little thing?”

“If I told you half of the story, you’d be runnin’ outta here like the Devil was on your tail rather than stay a second more under my goddamn roof,” he said in a very low and even tone that brooked no argument. “And it’s Wednesday now, which means you have one day left here before the truck comes for you. And I—” His hands were shaking now, his big broad hands capable of splitting wood and wrapping up her cuts, shaking like crazy. Ben jerked his head from side to side as if he was in pain, his breathing coming heavier. “I have a  _ routine _ , I have to have a routine, and you— you made it all— wrong—”

Guilt threatened to split her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, gathering herself to her feet. 

He was barely listening. “I hadn’t had a goddamn dream like that in almost three months, I was doing— good, better, I—”

_ And I brought it on, I reminded him of something, I asked, I pried, I’m nosy, I— _ Rey couldn’t even look at him. “I’ll go,” she whispered, ashamed. “I’m sorry I ever asked, I’m sorry, I wanted to— to know you, to understand you. Like how I told you about me.”

“You didn’t know,” he said roughly, wiping his eyes. “How could you? You forget sometimes. In a town this size. I came back, and— everyone knew  _ something _ about it. Everyone wanted to, you know, chat me up, get me in touch with their daughters. They thought I was some big hero, or else thought I was a ticket to government money.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “And I had my folks at first, but they— they didn’t understand this, any of it. What I got left with. How I felt. And then they died. Ain’t that a kick in the fuckin’ gut? Encouraged the whole thing to start with, ‘cause they wanted me to make somethin’ of myself, and then left me holding my own ass. I’m the… the town ghost, now. Floatin’ around. I do stuff on the side. Under the table. God knows why, ‘cause I don’t need the money. It’s just somethin’ to do with my hands that… isn’t drinkin’ the day away. That’s a plus to chasin’ runaway cows.”

Rey snorted in spite of herself, and he looked startled that she’d laughed at his remark, then let the corner of his mouth quirk up a little. “I guess if one of the cows pulled a knife on you, though, you’d wrestle it to the ground,” she said. 

Ben’s eyes widened, and he actually half smiled, his lips curving into the first embryonic stage while air snickered out of his nose. “But not choke it out,” he reminded her, eyes darting up as if to ask  _ is this okay? _

“Only if it asks nicely,” she shot back, and for some reason that was the funniest thing in the fucking world, because Ben’s shoulders started shaking, and she couldn’t stop giggling, and finally his eyes creased up into slits and he was laughing, actually laughing, full-throated and beaming, showing every goofy, crooked tooth. “Oh, my god, that wasn’t even  _ funny, _ ” she wailed hysterically, fighting more laughter. 

“Stop,” he wheezed, clutching his sides. “I can’t breathe, Jesus Christ, I ain’t laughed like this since, since—”

Rey wiped her eyes, desperately trying to get her breathing down to a reasonable rate. “I’m so sorry. Oh, god. You were, you were opening up to me about how lonely you were and I’m sitting here making jokes about cows.”

Ben’s laughter stilled into a faint smile, his eyes heavy and soft. “No, no. 'S all right.”

“I just— you know. You’re not alone. At least for the next day. Because you get to put up with me. Dumb city girl.” She offered him a smile, and he seemed to return it, shrugging his shoulder and ducking his head a little. 

“You must be lonely too, what with your job,” he said. “So I guess you got me for a bit, too. And I… I don’t think you’re dumb. City girl, sure, but not dumb.”

That shouldn’t have made her feel so warm and blooming, down in her belly, but it did. “Oh. Thanks.”

Ben stepped a little closer, as if he was a little wary of her. “I don’t… I don’t want you to feel like you ain’t safe here.”

“I appreciate that,” she said, for a loss of anything else to say.  _ Why is he looking at me like I’m a raccoon that might bolt?  _ “A lot. You didn’t have to help me, and you did.” 

Another step, and Ben was right up in front of her. He was close, really close, his hands clenched into tight fists at his sides, and he was  _ so big _ : big and shirtless and still gleaming with sweat. Rey had seen male bodies before, obviously, mostly in the context of photoshoots, but those were… oiled-up, perfectly sculpted guys with flawlessly delineated muscles and veins from a day of water fasting. None of them had shaggy hair that stuck to their temples, or broad, thickly built bodies from years of heavy labor, or red-rimmed, tired eyes that gazed at her with a strange hunger. She felt as if the earth had stopped, or paused, or slowed on his axis: here in the middle of this pre-built home with scratchy carpet and bad lighting, where she could almost feel the yawning emptiness of the outside world pressing against the thin walls.  “You oughta feel safe. So I’ll tell you. I wasn’t… I wasn’t gettin’ off in the bathroom,” he muttered, low and rough. “Yesterday morning. ‘Cause I—” and two warm cognac-colored eyes darted up to meet hers, like he was afraid, scared of something— “I can’t. Get off, I mean. Not— not in a while.”

Heat flooded Rey’s cheeks. “Oh,” she said, at a total loss for how to respond to _that_.

“The… the VA doctor said it was, uh, a psychological complication brought on by, um, stress and trauma.” Those eyes couldn’t meet hers, now: they were darting around the room like dragonflies as a flood of words spilled out of his normally quiet mouth, his own cheeks turning red. “I… I couldn’t even, uh, get— get hard most of the time, not even in the mornings, but I— well, yesterday I did, and I thought maybe I’d just try and see if I— but—”

“Nothing happened,” she said, realizing what he was getting at. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry I yelled at you.”

“'S all right,” he said, rubbing his nose. “Ain’t your fault. You didn’t know.”

“No, but it was rude,” she protested, and found herself echoing his own sentiment from the day:  _ don’t matter, still rude.  _ Just like how he had echoed her own thoughts with his words:  _ leave me alone! _ “Even if I didn’t know. I didn’t have the right. I’m sorry.”

There was a small pause, like a breath before a storm, and then he was speaking in a soft, toneless voice. “Ren’s Knights was a name made up for my ops team in Afghanistan,” Ben said. “Came from a terrible inside joke. I was writing my name on a piece of tape for my helmet and fucked the B up so bad it looked like an R, and they all started callin’ me Ren. The Knights part was ‘cause we did night operations, and we thought it was funny. We had patches made and everything.” Ben paused again, catching his breath a little, as if he was readying himself for the plunge. “August twelfth. Two thousand nine. We left Camp Dwyer at twenty-one hundred, went out on a patrol. Ten miles down the road, the first truck in the convoy hit an IED. We were in the second vehicle, and the Humvees weren’t armored back then, not real well, and we didn’t wanna be sitting ducks, so Ash— my buddy, Corporal Beck, rank below me but, uh, real good friend— he gets out with two of the PFCs in my team to set up a security perimeter and check for survivors in the first one and the next thing I know there’s fucking— fuckin’ gunfire and RPG’s, just lighting up the whole road.” 

Ben paused, taking a breath, his hands working at his sides. Clenching. Unclenching. Trembling. “So I start shouting for them to get back into the Humvee, you know— it’s armored. Ash— I kept shoutin’ for him to get down and take fuckin’ cover, and I guess he couldn’t hear me over the noise, ‘cause the next thing I see is— this big splatter of blood on the windshield, lit up by the gunfire every time it went off. Dead shot, right in the middle of his face, sideways through his cheek. Took his jaw off and half his nose.” The huge shoulders were shaking now: his head was bent to hide the tears dripping from his eyes. 

“After that, um, I dragged Wilde and Kennard back into the one up-armored Humvee and screamed at ‘em to stay put and fire out the windows to cover me, and I think I was goin’ back to get Ash, ‘cause I was just running on trying to see if he was still alive or not— and I wasn’t gonna leave him behind, anyway. And I was out there in the dirt, trying to get a pulse, and the next thing I know some— some kid, couldn’t have been more’n twenty, is comin’ at me with a chura the size of my arm— that’s uh, a kind of big knife that a lot of local folks use out there— and he got me in the face, where the helmet wasn’t covering me, and all the way down to my chest. I think he was just scared to death and aimin’ for my neck, but missed, ‘cause I heard him a second early and started moving. After that I— I know I got shot in the gut and the arm, felt like being hit with a hammer, but it was all a blur, kinda, still is— I just remember yankin’ the knife out of his hands and not feeling anything at all and just— killin’ him. Guy was probably ten years younger’n me, and I didn’t… care. I didn’t  _ care _ , and he died, and I dropped the knife and just pulled Ash’s body back into the Humvee and set myself up with my M-9 and just shot at every spot of gunfire lightin’ up in the dark I could see.”

Rey felt like her stomach was twisting into knots. “What happened to the team?” she whispered. 

Ben raised his head. Tear tracks glistened in the light from the kitchen. “Simpson and Rodgers got shot trying to radio backup. Had to pull their bodies in, too, and stack them up like cordwood in the back. Kennard got the radio working, and Leong and Wilde had to shoot road flares to finally get the incoming chopper to pin down our location, but Wilde caught a bullet in the arm doing it. Rescue team landed, secured the area, got us lifted directly to a Navy hospital in Germany for treatment. Don’t recall most of that. I’d lost a lot of blood. Think I passed out a couple times. That’s all.”

Swallowing wasn’t even an option. Rey stood there, stunned into silence. “Do you… talk to them, still?” she asked. “Leong and Wilde and—”

“Leong killed himself,” said Ben, sounding very brittle. “He was the only one who got out without being wounded, and I think it fucked with his head. Wilde had to have his arm taken off below the elbow. Last I heard he was tryin’ to get off the opioids the VA gave him; he don’t want to talk to anyone at all. Kennard— uh, drinks too much. Lives in Tennessee. I call up his mama a few times a year to check on him. So, no. We don’t talk.”

“I am so—”  _ Sorry _ didn’t seem to cover it, not at all, not in the slightest. No wonder he wanted to be left alone, out here in the middle of nowhere. “I don’t— I don’t know what to say,” she confessed. “I don’t know what I could say. Besides, uh, thank you, for trusting me enough to tell me that.”

“So now you know,” he said, voice almost a croak. “If you wanna run on back to the car and sleep there, you can. I just— I just wanted you to know. Figured you oughta.”

Rey took a breath, steadying herself. “I’m not going back to the car,” she said softly, which made him look up, unsure. “I’m staying here. If that’s— okay with you.”

“Christ,” he whispered, voice shaking a little as he scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands and dropped them down to his hips again. “Yeah. That’s— you sure?”

“Yeah,” she said, reaching out and brushing the back of his hand with her fingertips. It was the smallest touch, and he stiffened as if she’d grabbed him by the hair. “Yeah. You shouldn’t be alone after a nightmare like that.”

A soft, shuddering breath escaped his lips. “Thank you,” he mumbled, his hand flexing like she’d burned him. “You’re real kind, ma’am.”

“Do you think— you think you’d sleep better in the bed?” she offered. “Because of your, I mean, if you have to have a routine... I can always scoot over, or just sleep out here.”

“I—” He swallowed, looking up at her again. “It’s— yeah. I think so. But I don’t wanna kick you out of the—”

“I can sleep with you,” she said, and bit her lip at the double meaning. “I— not like, not— if you don’t— I mean I can share the bed with you.”

“Mm,” he said, rubbing the back of his rapidly flushing neck. “If I don’t… what?” 

“Want to, want to sleep with— I mean—” Her own words were tangling up between her brain and her mouth, and she fought to sound coherent. “If you didn’t want to— to, to sleep with me— not, not sleep with me like  _ sleep with _ me, but sleep with me just, just, next to me, because I’m fine with that. Actually, in all honesty, I’m really fine with either—”

She didn’t get a chance to finish her rambling train of thought before Ben’s mouth, hot and soft, came down to cover hers, his broad body backing her up into the counter, both hands gripping her waist (too tightly, and he seemed to realize it, because he moved his hands to the counter’s edge instead).  _ Oh, my god.  _ Rey couldn’t even think, couldn’t move: she could only react by giving him back as good as she was getting. He kissed like he was starving for human touch. Like an animal, terrified if he let go she’d slip away and run for it. His mouth tasted like sleep, and she opened hers to his, slipping her tongue along the smooth, plush bottom lip, her chin rubbing against the scraggly beard.  _ God, I hate facial hair…  _ but even as she thought it, she was bringing her hands up to cup his cheek, his jaw—

Ben jerked away, startled. “What’re you—”

“I—” She panted a little. “Just touching your face. Is that, that okay?”

“Dunno,” he responded, eyes downcast and guarded. “Never had nobody do that to me.”

“Well, just like, just like….” Rey waited until he nodded, and then she reached out and cupped his scarred cheek in her palm, brushing the unkempt beard with one thumb, gently, until he shut his eyes and relaxed a little. “There. See?” Up higher on his cheek, she traced the rough, jagged scar, and Ben’s breath caught in his throat, his eyes leaking a little. “Nothing to be scared of.”

“I shouldn’t’ve kissed you like that,” he managed in a throaty croak, shaking his head. “Not like— I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happenin’ to me.”

“You’re just wound up and on edge, I think,” said Rey, feeling slightly rejected, but that was fine: the guy probably had no idea what he wanted, let alone what she did. “Come on. Let’s go to sleep. Bed’s big enough for two.”

“Mm,” he grunted, but followed her back down the hallway to the bedroom, shoulders hunched in as if he was trying to make himself smaller.

* * *

Ben was very broad. Rey immediately realized maybe this wasn’t going to work, not with both of them lying down on their backs in the bed, but they managed to work out a position where Ben lay on his side and Rey on hers, both facing left, toward the door. He insisted on sleeping closer to the door, which meant Rey found herself  _ almost _ spooning him, staring at an expanse of pale, freckled upper back that was almost twice as wide as she was. Heat emanated from him like a stove. She understood why he kept the air conditioning on so cold now. 

“G’night,” she whispered as he reached for the lamp. 

“Night,” Ben answered, low and careful, and flicked it off, drenching the room in darkness as the AC whirred. “Rey?” he whispered a moment later.

“Yeah?” she breathed, trying not to move. 

“Thank you for listenin’... and stayin’ with me.” The words came out in a soft, quick rush: a quick leak in a massive dam, the promise of more behind his walls inherent in them. 

“Sure,” Rey said, stopping herself from reaching out in the dark to touch his back.  _ What would he feel like?  _ She wanted to say more— a thousand things bubbled up behind her lips, things like  _ if you kissed me like that again and kept going I might just stay here forever and ever _ , but she couldn’t say anything at all. 

* * *

Awareness came back drip by drip, sunshine bathing Rey’s cheeks in the light of morning. She was lying on her back, one arm flung above her head, and something very heavy and warm pressed down on her chest and stomach— actually, kind of more like most of her body was being pinned into place by something like a big, weighted blanket, and something was tickling her throat.  _ Huh, _ she thought, not wanting to open her eyes.  _ Wonder what that is.  _

Something moved slightly on her sternum; something was tickling her skin through the T-shirt. A warm, damp huff of air moved over her chest, and Rey froze, then opened her eyes, peering down to see a tangled mass of dark hair resting directly on her chest, a bare back stretched out over her body, huge shoulders bracketing her ribs, and a large, pale hand, palm down, planted on her left tit. 

_ Oh, shit.  _


	4. breath of cool air

Waking Ben up might not have been the best option, but Rey was starting to wonder if he’d be upset to find out he’d rolled onto her in his sleep, and if he might be more upset that she didn’t wake him up immediately. “Ben,” she whispered, lightly enough to not startle him.

He didn’t move. Just snuffled lightly and flexed both his big hands, which meant one gripped a wad of sheets a little tighter and the other squeezed her breast lightly. Rey bit her lip hard: her nipple was pointing directly at the ceiling, pebbled and hard, from all the excitement.  _ Fuck, fuck, fuck.  _ “Ben,” she tried again, a little louder, and he grunted, mumbled something inarticulate, and ground his hips up against her thigh in a slow, lazy movement.

Oh.

It seemed Rey’s body wasn’t the only one springing to attention in this bed. 

Her face went as hot as the summer sun outside. “Ben,” she croaked, torn between waking him up to stop him and maybe waking him up to ask him to keep going, because she knew that dick was big, could feel it, had seen the outline of it in his underwear last night, and to be frank, Rey hadn’t gotten laid in a while— 

_ But Ben’s got some problems in that area, _ she remembered suddenly, and felt guilty for even thinking about it. What he had described sounded like… maybe erectile dysfunction, coupled with an inability to reach climax at all, and that…

_ He has a mouth, doesn’t he? Hands? _ She shut her eyes tight.  _ Goddamn it! No! Stop! He’s been through trauma and shit and he isn’t like those guys I meet at parties or influencer events, he’s not— he doesn’t—do casual, probably, he said he didn’t know why he kissed me— _

Another roll of Ben’s hips punctuated with a low, soft groan, and that  _ sound,  _ that fucking sound— if chocolate had a voice, that would be it: desperate and dark and sweet. Rey swallowed hard, suddenly finding herself going damp and hot and insistent between her legs, a terrible want rushing through her gut and puddling in the cradle of her pelvis. Her skin prickled with anticipation: that cock rubbing against her thigh promised a sweet, full—

_ Everything. _

“Ben,” she tried one more time with her final shred of sanity, reaching up to stroke his hair with the hand that wasn’t pinned under his body. “Hey, um, Ben—”

He finally jerked to wakefulness at the touch, his sleep-dazed eyes gazing up at her from between her breasts, where his chin hovered. A fold of the T-shirt she wore had left a red crease furrowed into his cheek. “Uh,” he mumbled, blinking. “Rey?”

“H-hi,” she whispered, and he must have mistook her trembling voice for fear instead of eagerness because he lifted himself off her instantly, his eyes full of guilt. 

“Aw,  _ shit _ ,” he said, pulling away and leaving her cold. “Shit, ma’am, I’m sorry—”

“I—” Rey shut her eyes, trying to gather a breath. “It’s fine. I didn’t mind it.”

“You—you didn’t?” he stammered, absolutely baffled, apparently, by the idea that a woman might like being used as a pillow by a man twice her size. “Was I— I’m sorry to ask, but— I was havin’ a dream about, uh—” His cheeks bloomed scarlet as Rey nodded and rolled to her side, her thighs pressed together under the sheets.

“You, um, you were kind of rubbing on me. And mumbling in your sleep. It. I— it was—” Rey closed her eyes. She was not going to be able to get rid of this feeling, not even with a cold shower. “I’m so sorry. I’m very— I’m—I think I need some, um, alone time in here, so I can— I—”

“You’re…” Ben gazed down at her, kneeling on the bed, thick thighs spread and feet tucked behind him as he stared. “Oh.  _ Oh.  _ You mean you— you’re—”

“Yes,” she rasped, ashamed as she tried to fight the need to touch herself until he was out of the fucking room, out of— “It, it, it was very much a turn on and I’m sorry, I’m— I didn’t—”

“You… you’re turned on by  _ me _ ,” he muttered, as if he was trying to parse it out. “Now that I surely can’t believe—you’re a damn model, you’re—and I’m— I’m—” Ben shook his head, at a loss for words: his lips were parted like he was stunned.

“If you don’t believe me,” she ground out through her teeth, “go on and check m-my… my _radiator_. I dare you. _Mechanic.”_

The ghost of a smile played for a single second at the corner of his mouth, and then Ben was reaching for her, both broad hands splayed out over her hips, and Rey thought she might  die if he kept touching her like that. His thumbs hooked into the waistband of her— his, really, they were borrowed— boxers, and he glanced up as if to check one more time. A nod was all he needed, and he was kneeling at her thighs, carefully peeling the underwear down her legs, exposing her crotch to the cool air of the bedroom as well as the stubble growing there (God, she was due for a wax, and her legs were prickly with a couple of day’s worth of growth but he didn’t even seem to care) along with the wet, swollen folds of delicate flesh that were slowly unfolding behind. 

Rey sucked in a breath as Ben balled up the boxers and tossed them to the side without even looking away. He stared in frank astonishment, then looked up at her. “You weren’t lyin’, were you?” he muttered half to himself in a low, toneless whisper, and his fingers came back to shake a little against her inner thigh. “Can I— could I touch you, and just see—”

“Yes, yes,  _ please _ ,” she forced out, and fought a little whine as his index finger, the wide flat pad of it, sought out her core by gently rubbing up and down her inner labia, exploring the unknown territory there, parting her, sinking into where she needed him as his thumb pressed up near her clit. A jolt of need shot through her body, making her toes curl. “Up, and, and over to the right,” she gasped, and he did as she said, frowning a little in concentration as he found the right place, leaning on his left hand as he worked her with his right. Rey moaned aloud, seizing the sheets in her fists: his finger was thick and solid as his body was, and he began to pump in a leisurely way, the slick, wet sound of her filling the room. “Oh, my god,” she whispered, letting her head fall back. 

“D’you want… another one?” he offered tentatively, and she nodded, throat thick. He pulled out his index and slotted his middle alongside it, plunging both digits in slowly and making her whimper a little. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” she wheezed, and his thumb came down a little firmer, making her squirm as the raw bundle of swollen nerves got plenty of attention— but it wasn’t in a cadence she could easily catch, and she didn’t know how to explain it to him. “I need, I, Ben—”

“Mm,” he grunted, and slipped his fingers out of her, prompting her body to reflexively clamp down on nothing, empty:  _ come back, _ she wanted to beg— but he was pulling her to the edge of the bed, getting down on his knees, his eyes gleaming with a sudden hunger—

One thigh was taken by a big hand, pushed apart from the other one. Ben’s free hand pressed along her hip, and she let out a yelp as his mouth delved greedily down where her thighs met her body.  _ Oh god, what, what? _ He wasn’t very good, but he was definitely enthusiastic: lips and tongue slipping and sliding, his nose bumping against her clit as he rubbed back and forth, humming softly to himself, side to side, and that was something she could work with. “Ben,” she tried, struggling to raise her hips up. “That, you have to, to—”

“Tell me,” he mumbled into her skin. 

“Give me, give me two fingers again,” she directed, trying to get her thoughts in order. “And thrust a little more evenly, like—”

“Like this?” he asked, brows furrowed as he thrust a couple of blunt, thick fingers back in, and  _ oh _ that was a nice stretch. “And…” He started to pump gently, in and out in a more even beat, and Rey shuddered. 

“Y-yeah, that’s—”  _ almost perfect, _ she thought wildly. “And put, put, your tongue on my clit, like, circular, rub it—”

Ben bent down to his task, the flat of his tongue pressing down on her in a broad, even stripe, over and over, slow and steady like a heartbeat. Rey groaned, tangling her fingers into his hair without thinking as she felt the pressure building and building, a bomb threatening to go off in her body, her nerves winding up, every muscle tight—

When she finally came, it was like dissolving into warm, sparking light. Her thighs tensed, shaking, as she yelped out her release into the bedroom. Ben licked her open again, humming softly as he gathered all the slick mess up from her cunt to her clit, and opened his eyes, gazing up at her. “Shit,” she panted, shaking a little, trying to prop herself up on her elbows to look at him more clearly. 

“Shit,” he echoed, heavy-lidded eyes raking over her body before they closed, his shoulders heaving. “God  _ damn _ . I ain’t been this hard since— since—” A shudder left him as his voice dropped down an octave, low and rumbling, his eyes fluttering back open. “Pardon me sayin’ so, but I— I don’t even care if I don’t get no relief outta it. I just want to be inside you.”

“Yeah?” she gasped, still trying to catch her breath, calm her heartbeat as her brain wheeled for purchase. “You w-want to get inside me?”

“Oh, God,” he groaned, pressing his forehead to her thigh almost reverently. “I’ve wanted it since I— since— since I saw you on the road, all dusty and beat from walkin’ and tryin’ to find a mechanic to fix that damn car. God help me, I wanted you. Didn’t even know you yet under all that dirt.”

“Then I guess you’d better get your pants off,” she gasped before she could think of anything else to say.

A heartbeat, an eternity. Ben looked up like he thought she might be joking, and when she just looked at him expectantly, he scrambled to his feet all at once, giving her a good eyeful of a very sizable erection as he yanked his boxer-briefs off and tossed them to the floor, letting his dick spring free and swing around to point at her like the needle of a compass.  Big. Very big, and dribbling clear precum from the flushed head: nothing looked dysfunctional about that, though appearances could be deceiving. Rey scooted back on the bed as he crawled down atop her, his hands shaking, his breath coming hot on her cheek as he got positioned between her thighs clumsily. There was something endearing about the way he grasped himself at the base, spreading the leaking mess around the head with a wide thumb as he eyed her with some amount of terror, and suddenly Rey wondered—

“You— have you, you, you’ve had sex before, right?”

Color bloomed from his high cheekbones to his chest, suffusing him in rich color. “Yeah,” he said shortly. “Long time ago. I ain’t— I know enough not to hurt you, if that’s what you—”

_ I mean, there’s hurting someone and there’s good sex; kind of a spectrum,  _ Rey thought, slightly panicked. He was a big man, with big hands and feet, and his dick definitely lived up to the rumors about men with big extremities. It looked just about big enough to do some damage if not handled correctly, but somehow she thought if she was in pain, she would only have to say the word, and he’d stop. “Okay,” she whispered, spreading her knees. “Come here, then. Come on.” A sudden thought occurred to her. “I’m— I’m on the shot. And I don’t— have anything.”

Ben let out a little grunt. “Mm. I don’t have nothin’ in the house in the way of, uh, any of that, but I— you don’t gotta worry about nothin’ on my end, either.” He lowered himself down, kneeling, and pulled her closer: thighs bracketing his hips, the tip of his cock nudging at her still-tender entrance. “I got it,” he muttered, almost to himself, and exhaled deeply as he slowly, slowly pushed into her body. 

Rey’s mouth fell open in a soft O of shock. He was  _ splitting _ her, stuffing her full, pushing in and in— nothing hurt, he felt so fucking  _ good _ . “Oh, my god, oh, god, Ben,” she babbled, squirming on his cock as he groaned and pulled her down by the waist, down until her ass was pressed flush against his hips, her thighs clutching his waist. “Oh, fuck, fuck,  _ fuck _ —”

“I’m  _ tryin _ _’_ ,” he groaned, bottomed out and shaking above her, bracing himself on his forearms. He shook his head sharply, just above her face, eyes boring into hers. “Jesus fuckin’  _ Christ _ —” 

“Move, move,” she begged, half ashamed of herself and half desperate to just get some fucking friction going. “Please—”

“Shh, shh,” he panted, never breaking the eye contact he held with her as he shuffled awkwardly. “Hold on. My knee’s stuck.” He wriggled his wide knee out of a tangle of sheets and pushed her back a little, landing them both in the middle of the bed. “There. You all right?”

“I’m fine,” Rey managed, clinging to his shoulders. The scarred one felt rough, the skin puckered under her fingers: the other shoulder was warm and pliable under her hand. “Just, just, can you m-move—” She rolled her hips a little to emphasize, and he grunted, then started to gently, cautiously thrust in slow, controlled movements. 

Rey threw her head back in a soundless, open-mouthed gasp for air. He felt so fucking good, every nerve inside her body being stroked on the way in and the way out, lush and snug and thick and  _ full _ — “Ben,” she whined, her thighs starting to ache from being held so far open. Maybe missionary was the only position he knew, though, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “Oh, oh  _ fuck, _ fuck it’s good really good oh  _ god  _ it feels—”

“You tell me,” he panted, sweat gleaming on his forehead. “Tell me when you’re gonna come, sweetheart; tell me all about it. I wanna watch you. Can I watch you?”

_ Sweetheart, sweetheart.  _ Rey’s throat felt full. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll— I’m— I—” She’d always had to give herself some extra stimulation with regular PIV sex, but he was awkwardly grinding right up on her pubic mound and her clit, graceless movements drawing her closer and closer to toppling over the edge again. “Ben, Ben, I— keep d-doing that, I think I’m gonna—”

“Yeah? Like this?” Ben crushed himself closer, her thighs shrieking in protest, but that didn’t matter anymore because her second orgasm, this one way stronger than the first, tore through her body, making her wail and cling to him, shuddering until it had all left her system and she fell back, drained, onto the rumpled sheets. “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, one hand under her neck, cradling her head as she moaned. “Oh, you look so good like that, sweetheart. Felt real, good, too. Got all snug, squeezin' down all around me. You— can you give me another one? Huh?” He emphasized what he meant with another slow slide of his hips into hers, and she groaned: her thighs were cramping like crazy by now. “You got any more in you?”

“Yeah. Can, you, you can roll me over,” she panted, trying to find his face. Both whiskey-colored eyes were gazing down at her with a fascinated thirst, like this was the wildest thing they’d ever seen. “You’re big. Sorry. My thighs are hurting.”

“Oh,” he said, abashed, and pulled out of her, rolling her to her belly and mounting her from the back. That thick cock slid back in between her upper thighs and right where it belonged again, and Rey groaned, clutching at the blankets. Dizzily, she realized she still had his T-shirt on. She wondered if he was going to take it off her. Maybe not. That was okay. She could gladly have sex with her shirt on every day forever, as long as Ben’s dick was cramming her to the brim. “Like that?” he asked, bottoming out again. “Oh,  _ oh, _ hey, now, this’s a little different, huh—”

“Yeah, yes,  _ yes _ like that,” she wailed. This angle was pressing him right into what she was pretty sure was her G-spot, and the sudden shock of desperation flooding her  _ definitely _ had something physical at play. “Oh, god, god— Ben I’m gonna I’m gonna  _ come again _ I’m gonna fucking m-make a mess—”

That just seemed to work Ben up even more. The movements got more forceful as he crushed himself down atop her, jammed a hand under her hips, and started pressing the heel of it across her clit. “ _ Yeah, _ make a mess, make a mess all over my fuckin’ bed, I don’t care, Rey, come for me, c’mon, sweetheart, baby, go on, now—” A half-crazed shriek Rey hadn’t known she was capable of making tore out of her throat as she squeezed her eyes shut and bore down around his cock, howling out her release as she gushed over the bed, his hand, his dick. Ben let out a little gasp of shock and pushed her through it, pressing his cheek to hers as he bent over her body. “ _ Ho _ -ly God, I can  _ feel _ that, feel you all tight around me, feel—” His hand pressed up flat to her abdomen as he kept thrusting, Rey choking out a garbled wail, and he grunted. “God  _ damn _ I— I can feel my own cock right here.” He illustrated by pushing deeper, his palm feeling out the deep, muffled swell of his own dick through the skin of her abdomen as she squealed in protest at the intrusion. “You’re so  _ little _ ,” Ben groaned into her ear. “Jesus Christ. I’m liable to break you.”

“You, you,” she moaned, trying to actually put coherent words together. “I can’t come, not again. You can— if you—”

He sighed, pressing a rough, scratchy kiss to the curve of her ear and pulling out, leaving her feeling bereft. “Ain’t gonna happen,” he said gruffly. “But you’re real considerate.”

“Oh,” Rey panted. It felt like all her insides had been rearranged, her body floating in a warm, heavy soup. She wanted to make him feel as good as he’d made her feel. It didn’t seem fair. Nobody had ever given her three orgasms in a row before. She took a few deep breaths and rolled over, running her hand down her face.  _ I’ve just fucked a man in the middle of nowhere, whose doublewide I’m staying in, whose shirt I’m still wearing, who’s got PTSD and can’t come and I think it might?? Have been?? The best sex of my life?? What?? _

“Penny for your thoughts,” said a low, soft voice by her ear. Rey swallowed. Ben had decided to stretch out next to her, a careful distance, but still present. 

“Oh. Just— just thinking about you.”

“Mm. Good things, I hope?” His beard tickled her as he pressed a cautious little kiss to her jaw. 

“Oh, definitely,” Rey said, letting her eyes drift shut. “I might need a minute to recover. Can I— can I ask a personal question?”

“Shoot,” he said, the bed dipping a little behind her as a broad hand carefully came to rest on her naked hip. 

“How old are you?”

Ben let out a little chuckle. “Mm. Thirty-four.”

“Oh.” Rey did some quick math in her head. Thirty-four, and 2009 had been… eleven years ago? “So you… you got out of the army when you were twenty-three?”

“Army,” he scoffed, sighing deeply. “Marines, and I was… just turned twenty-four. Joined when I was eighteen, right out of highschool. Shot up through the ranks real quick, though.”

Rey caught her bottom lip in her teeth. “And you… you said you’d, um, had sex before?”

“Oh,  _ Lord _ ,” said Ben, flinging a hand up to drape over his eyes. “You’re ‘bout to tell me I did somethin’ wrong—”

Rey felt herself turn crimson. “No! No, you’re fine, it just— I was wondering  _ when _ you’d had sex before, because if you haven’t, I mean, if you can’t— for eleven years—”

“Ah,” he said, peeking at her out of the crook of his elbow. “All right. But you ain’t allowed to laugh at me when I say it.”

“Never in a million years,” she promised, rolling onto her side, completely intrigued. “Go on, then.”

Ben sighed. “Her name was Cadie. She was a year younger’n me, grew up down the street from us, and my mama adored her, said she was like a daughter to her. Graduated together, dated in highschool. We was— were supposed to get married after I came back from my tour in ‘09. I gave her a promise ring and before I left we— well. Uh. We drove out to the back fields and kinda—consummated everything beforehand in the F-250.”

“In the  _ truck? _ _”_ Rey asked, horrified and delighted. 

“Yeah. Once you recline the seats, it ain’t too bad. Anyway.” He rubbed his nose self-consciously. “It wasn’t great. Nothin; like— what we just did, anyway. Cadie started cryin’ and talkin’ about how she was goin’ to hell for havin’ sex outside marriage when I hadn’t even gotten an inch into her yet, and I felt real bad and stopped, ‘cause it was— I mean, she was carryin’ on fit to beat the band. Held her for a little bit, and then she decided she’d try and do, um, oral on me, and I— I finished so quick I think I scared her.” A flush was spreading over his cheeks. “Anyway, after that I shipped out, and you know the rest. I came home a year later to recuperate with all my bags, and come to find out Cadie’d married another guy from school. Name of Samuel Neil Anthony Purdue— we used to call him Snap for short. Last I heard, they were living up in South Bend with their kids.”

“Oh,  _ wow, _ ” said Rey, amazed. “So you just never… anyone else?”

“Not till you,” he said, glancing at her from under his eyelashes. “Truth be told, I think, if we’re gettin’ technical, you… you’re my first, I guess. Ain’t you?”

Warmth soaked through her body, warmth that had nothing to do with the sunshine coming through the blinds.  _ I’m his first. I’m someone’s first.  _ “I guess I am,” she said. “Okay, here’s an idea. A thought. Which you do not have to, um, respond to, if you don’t want to. You said you liked when you had, um, oral done on you, right?”

“Uh,” said Ben, rolling over and burying his face in the bed to hide a blush. “Yeah. I did.”

“And nobody’s… nobody’s done it to you since you came back?”

“Nobody’s done nothing to me since I came back,” he said, shooting a look at her from under his mop of dark hair. “Hardly even been hugged since my folks passed, to tell you the truth.”

“What if… what if…” Rey screwed her face up. “Have you thought about, um, maybe— maybe trying having someone give you a blowjob, and seeing if that maybe helps, uh, the whole— the—”

“I have considered it,” he said, with all the slow, careful dignity a naked man facedown in stained sheets could possess. “It was not an option that presented itself as feasible for quite some time, ma’am.”

“I mean. Not ‘till now,” Rey amended, shooting him a look, and Ben blinked at her. 

“Are you— are you offerin’ to  _ blow me _ ?”

“I— I want to help you,” she said quickly, sitting up and looking down at his bare, pale ass as he rolled to his side to look up at her. “I really do, Ben. And if we can work out— maybe I won’t be around here forever, but if I can help you get over this one thing, or any one thing— because I can tell it’s eating you up, all the crap you went through, all that shit nobody else in this town’s gonna help you with— I see those photos on the wall, that little boy who had a big smile, and I want, I don’t know. I want to help him come back. Just a little. Because I know he’s still in here.” She reached down and rested her hand on his chest, right over the thatch of dark, coarse hair between his pectorals. “Or else you wouldn’t have stopped on the street to ask if a stranger was okay.”

Ben’s eyes had gone very wet. He was silent, his eyes closing for a moment as a wet track slipped shining from his eyelashes to his nose. “Thank you kindly,” he said gruffly, sitting up awkwardly and rubbing his eyes clear. “I ain’t— I can’t ask you to do that, though.”

Rey swallowed. “But—”

“But nothin’. I—” He jerked his body upright, wobbling a little to get his balance, then bending down to snatch up his underwear from the crumpled heap they’d landed in on the carpeted floor. “It’s, it’s fine. You done me enough of a favor this mornin’. Please don’t— don’t worry yourself on my account.”

“I’m not— it’s not a bother—” Rey couldn’t understand: why couldn’t he look her in the eyes? But he just shied away from her, even when she reached out to him, and with a breath of cool air he was gone, the bedroom empty except for her in the warm morning sunlight.


	5. upended

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: [drumroll] oral sex! it is NOT rough, there is no face-fucking.
> 
> one more chapter eeehe

Thursday passed much like it had the day before. Ben threw on his requisite three layers of clothes and went into the yard to split wood while Rey sat inside, freshly showered in her borrowed shirt (today it was a threadbare, soft old dark blue thing that said THIS MAN LOVES COUNTRY MUSIC) and puttered around in the kitchen. She made him more sweet tea, just like she had the day before, because his agonized words from the prior night kept floating around inside her head:  _ I have to have a routine _ . And maybe she’d upset his routine once she left, but while she was still here, she didn’t see a reason to turn his life upside down any more than she had to. 

Ben came into the house around one in the afternoon, gulped down half the tea, offered her a polite half-smile and a nod, and headed back out, dripping sweat. Rey sipped at the tea and wandered the house, coming across even more old things. Photo albums, half-full of Kodak snaps: family trips, an RV, a huge shaggy dog that seemed to disappear around the time Ben graduated highschool, and two glossy 4x6” photos of a lanky young Ben with the same slight blond girl.

_ Oh. Cadie.  _ Rey looked closely. One of the photos appeared to have been taken at prom: Ben wore a badly-fitting suit on his lanky, long frame, and his ears stuck out on each side of his head like two halves of a moon under his firmly combed dark hair. Cadie’s blond hair was piled on top of her head in a spiky puff and she wore a bright teal, strapless gown and a big smile. Rey flipped it over.  _ Ben & Cadie, 2003, _ read the back in careful ballpoint pen. The other photo showed Ben and Cadie in far more casual clothes, sitting on a front porch of a house that wasn’t this one: his parents must have owned another house at some point, Rey thought to herself, one big enough for three people and a dog before they’d downsized to the doublewide. In the second photo, Cadie sat on the front porch swing, smiling down at Ben, who grinned shyly up at her, his hand curled around a soda can, his knees up and apart casually, free hand dangling down. That one just said  _ 2002  _ on the back. 

He looked so different without his scraggly beard and long hair. Goofy and fresh and young and carefree, with gentle eyes.  _ Where did you go? _ She touched the face frozen in a shy smile, the short hair, the big ears.  _ Where do our old selves go when we grow out of who we are? _

Maybe nowhere. Maybe everywhere. 

Maybe they didn’t go anywhere at all.

_ Where did I go when Amilyn signed me to RA? _ She didn’t know the answer to that one, either: the angry, defensive teenager had become someone more polished (kind of), more sophisticated (okay, not really) and less emotional (ha-ha, bullshit) — well, maybe she hadn’t, had she? That girl still existed in her mind, inside of her. Sometimes she didn’t even feel like she was actually in her mid-twenties, like growing up was a big joke that everyone in the world was in on. Maybe it was the same for everyone. Maybe it was the same for Ben.

The sun was setting when he came back in, kicking off his boots at the door and shutting it behind him. “Hey,” he said, wiping his sweaty face with a dirty sleeve, and jabbed a thumb at the hall. “I’ll shower. You want to go to the diner?”

“Sure,” said Rey, and she did, really: she was starving and a big chunk of meatloaf would hit the spot right about now. “I’ll go get my shoes.”

* * *

They ate in companionable silence in a corner booth of the diner. Maz, who remembered her from the first night they’d been there, came over to take their order immediately, and scampered off to get water for them both. Rey saw her behind the long counter, too, exchanging quiet gossip with the cook and the dishwasher as they peered behind the wall to gaze at her and Ben. They did make an odd couple: him in his clean, dark green plaid shirt, clean Levis, and boots; Rey in her khaki shorts, borrowed old white Converse, and one of his shirts: this one was brown and said in large, elaborate lettering I NEED SOME HANK AND SOMETHING TO DRANK. Definitely a bold fashion choice, and not something she would have chosen to wear on a date. Not that this was a date. Was it? At least she’d gotten her hair to dry in a nice, loose wave, and let it down around her shoulders.

They didn’t… really talk. Rey stared mostly at her plate, and focused on eating: apparently he didn’t know how to broach the subject of the sex they’d had that morning, and she wasn’t keen on bringing it up in front of people he’d known since he was born, so they just stayed silent. Her tender bits were still a little sore, though.  _ God, if you’re listening, please send me an ibuprofen. _

Just as they were finishing up, her shoe brushed the foot of the table. Rey pushed up to adjust her seat, and Ben coughed a little, the table leg moving— wait, no, that was his boot. 

“Sorry,” she said under her breath. 

“Mm,” he grunted, and stole a glance at her from under his hair (he always took his hat off when he came inside, likely force of habit). “I’m too old to play footsie under th’ table.”

She laughed in spite of herself. “No? Well, not too old to think about something else I could do under the table, I hope.”

For an instant, she thought she’d misjudged her joke, and in the next heartbeat realized what she’d just said as Ben’s cheeks flushed to a deep, broad scarlet and his lips parted, eyes huge as he stared at her. “We,” he managed to force past his shaking mouth, “are in  _ public,  _ ma’am.”

“I— I didn’t—” Rey stammered, looking into her plate of mostly-eaten mashed potatoes and meatloaf, but not fast enough to not see the way he shifted in his seat, one hand working its way subtly into his lap. “Oh, my god. Are you  _ hard _ right now?” she whispered, darting a glance back at the counter, where, thank fuck, the little congregation of busybodies had disappeared. Maz was grabbing a coffee for a man at the counter, and the other two had vanished into the back of the kitchen.

“No thanks to  _ you, _ ” he hissed back, eyes bright and wild as he tried to adjust himself through his jeans. “Jesus Christ, it ain’t been like this for  _ years,  _ it  _ hurts, _ I can’t get it situated—”

Rey pressed her mouth into a thin line, brain working wildly. “I’ll get it. Don’t move,” she whispered, and dropped her napkin on purpose, under the table, under cover of the plasticky red and white checked tablecloth backed with cheap fuzzy felt before she glanced up at him, eyebrows raised. “Okay?”

Ben’s eyes met hers: wide, huge, whiskey-colored. “Oh, my God,” he muttered, and nodded tersely. 

That was all she needed. Rey ducked down under the tablecloth, into the dim below-table realm of used chewing gum and a dust bunny, and snatched up the napkin, her forehead inches from Ben’s knees. She put her hand on his calf gently, and he jerked, almost kicking her in the face before she pushed his knee open. 

“You found that napkin?” he asked, sounding deceptively bored as she reached up and palmed him through the thick denim of his fly. Huge, and thick, and emanating heat like the rest of his body—and half of it was trapped down his right pant leg, it seemed, pinched by a seam.

“Almost,” she said, muffled, and unbuckled his belt. Ben’s hips jerked on instinct, which made his breath come in a hiss of pain as the movement pinched his dick. Rey got his button undone and his fly tugged down, exposing his clean, dark blue boxer-briefs. He was stone still as she tugged the front vent open and reached in, her hand probably a little cold on his hot skin, but he couldn’t stop the nervous tremor in his thigh as she tugged his legs a little further apart and pulled his dick free of its confines, adjusting him to lie flat (or, really, as flat as she could get him) along one hip before she pulled the vent closed again. 

Actually. Rey hesitated, fingers on his waistband, his flushed cock still exposed and dribbling clear, sticky fluid from the tip, and that might be messy. Rey was struck by a thought, a thought she tried to fight but that kept worming its way back into her brain.  _ I could lick him. Just a little, just to clean him up, maybe tease…  _

“I think you found it,” said Ben from above, sounding just this side of ragged. 

“I think I did,” she said, warm and hot against his abdomen. Ben stiffened, knees tightening around her torso, and Rey leaned down and carefully swiped away the precum with a very gentle, delicate lick across the head of his cock. 

His thighs clamped down around her upper body hard enough to bruise, and a long,  _ loud _ sound like he was dying came from above the table. Rey’s heart dropped into her stomach. “Ben!” said a voice, floating closer, and Rey, trapped, froze. It was Maz: her sensible sneakers were visible about a foot away from Rey’s knees beyond the cover of the tablecloth. “You all right?”

“Indigestion,” he croaked from somewhere above her in a voice that sounded fifty shades of fucking destroyed. Rey did his pants up with lightning speed, even remembering to buckle the belt as he leaned forward onto the table above, hiding her from view. “My, my—I’m sorry, Maz, I gotta go. If you see my friend, you tell her I’ve gone to the truck. She went to the bathroom.”

“Oh, sure thing. No, don’t pay, I’ll get this cleared. I keep tellin’ Dex to stop puttin’ so much mayonnaise in the potato salad.” Maz clucked her tongue, and Rey, freed suddenly from the vise of Ben’s knees, scuttled backward as he stood up and scooted out, shuffling away with a muttered apology. Maz’s feet went back and forth as she bussed the table, and Rey heard the bells on the door clang cheerfully as Ben left the diner. 

_ Oh, my god, he left me here.  _ There wasn’t any time to think about that, though, because Maz was done cleaning off the table, and Rey had to wait for the right moment to pop back up and pretend like she’d walked over from the bathroom. The sneakers walked away, and Rey took a deep breath, peeked out from under the tablecloth, and saw no shoes in either direction. A voice from the back kitchen confirmed that Maz was back there, and Rey slid out, stood up, and looked around, confirming that she was alone in the back of the diner. 

“Hello?” she called, trying to sound confused, and Maz’s big eyes behind their Coke-bottle glasses popped up from behind the wall. 

“Oh, hey, honey! Ben went back to the truck. Said he didn’t feel well.”

“Oh, no,” said Rey, affecting the biggest, most sympathetic eyes she could force herself to make. “I’ll go and find him. Thanks.” She ducked out the door, the heat of the evening hitting her like a ton of bricks, and ran to the F-250, which was already running and waiting in the parking lot. Her fingers curled around the sweltering door handle as she yanked it open, jumped up on the running board, and slid into the cool air conditioning of the cab without wasting any more time.

Ben was hunched over in the driver’s seat, staring at her wildly as she pulled the door shut, locking the cold air in. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he rasped, hoarse and wild. “Do you have  _ any  _ idea what you—”

“I’m sorry,” she said immediately, clapping her hands to her cheeks as regret and terror washed over her. Was he going to kick her out of the truck? Was he mad? “Oh, my god, I don’t know what came over me, I thought, I thought—”

“You  _ thought _ ,” he snarled, and reached over across the center console, gripped the back of her head, and dragged her face to his for a brutal, bruising kiss. Rey’s side was being shoved into the hard plastic, but she couldn’t bring herself to move, not when Ben’s big hands were tangled in her hair and his tongue was slotting against her mouth and his beard was rubbing all over her face. He came up for air, but didn’t let her go, just kept her head right where it was, forehead pressed to hers. “Don’t you know you’re killin’ me?” he choked out, sounding like he might cry. “You’re gonna be leavin’ tomorrow, leavin’ all this behind: don’t you— don’t you dare offer me somethin’ I ain’t had in years and yank it out from under me like a rug.”

“I— I didn’t think of it like that,” she panted, searching his eyes. “I thought, I thought if I could help, then you could— find someone, maybe, and, and, like—”

“I don’t want nobody,” he whispered, his hands tightening on her nape. “I don’t need—  _ help _ , I don’t, I—” Both hands were shaking, tangled in her hair, and big tears were welling in his eyes. Rey’s heart broke for him: this big, strong man who was kind to strangers wore his own body like armor around his heart, and why wouldn’t he? His once-bright future had been torn away, his life narrowed down to this tiny town and the routine he clung to; the past and the future rolled into one bleak line together. 

But here, here in this space between both of their lives, maybe she could change something about that.

Rey shut her eyes and lunged forward for him, her mouth capturing his, her hands reaching up to stroke his cheek, the big curved ear poking out from under his soft hair:  _ let me touch you, _ she thought dizzily as he surrendered and opened his mouth to her,  _ let me show you I can help you, I can, I can…  _ Ben gave a helpless moan and let her push the brim of his hat up as she shoved herself even closer across the console in an awkward position that left her draped over it, kneeling in the passenger seat to reach him. “It’s okay,” she said, coming up for air. 

“God,  _ God _ .” He groaned like he was in pain, his hands shaking. “I thought I was g-gonna come right there in my fuckin’ pants, right in that booth. Why’d you  _ do _ that to me, Rey?”

“Let me do it again,” she begged, cupping his face in her hands. “Please. Let me just try—”

“I can’t let you, I can’t,” Ben groaned, pressing his forehead to hers, and she realized what the emotion written through his face was: fear. He was scared: scared, maybe, of letting anyone get close, get in, see him vulnerable, maybe, like Cadie had, so long ago— 

“Are you afraid I’m gonna leave you like Cadie did?” Rey whispered, an inch from his face. A quiet, agonized whimper was her only answer, but it was good enough for her. “I’m not. I swear I’m not. I won’t. I’ll— I’ll drive out here every month if I have to, just to see you. I’ll work around my whole schedule. I’ll—”  _ Upend my life, ruin my career, do anything,  _ she found herself thinking, and shut her mouth instantly: what was she  _ saying? _ Thinking?  _ You can’t be this horny, you’ve never been horny enough to contemplate ending your whole career for a man— _

But Ben was crying, really crying, tears tracking down into his beard as he clung to her waist with those big, shaking hands. “Oh, God. Rey, you’re killin’ me—”

A tap on the window interrupted their conversation, and Ben’s head whipped around at the same time Rey’s did. Maz was standing outside the driver’s side window, eyebrows raised, peering at them over the top of her thick glasses and holding a wallet. Ben’s wallet. She rapped on the window again, and Ben let out a long, patient sigh, then rolled the window down as Rey guiltily scrambled back into the passenger seat. 

“You dropped this near the door on your way out,” said Maz, giving him a very knowing look. “I see your...  _ indigestion _ cleared up real quick.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, eyes downcast as he took the wallet. “Thank you.”

“Well. ‘S much as I like you, and I’m happy about, ah, all this—” Maz gestured at Rey, and Rey ducked her head, humiliated— “do you think you could kindly take it back to the house, Ben?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, barely looking at her. A deep crimson flush was staining his cheeks as he stepped on the brake pedal and shifted into reverse. “We was just goin’. Sorry to be a bother.”

“Mm, well, you have a nice day, now,” said Maz, and nodded at Rey, her mouth twisting into a wry little smile. 

“Bye, Maz,” squeaked Rey, unable to look the woman in the eyes, and then the F-250 was backing out to the street and Ben was slamming it into drive and heading for the house as fast as the speed limit would allow. 

* * *

He had barely turned the engine off before he was out of the truck in the yard, striding to her side and yanking the door open for her. Rey could almost sense the desperation rolling off him like perfume, especially when he gripped her hand to help her down to the running-board and the grass, and when he kept a hand on the small of her back, like he was afraid she might run for it on the way to the porch and the front door. 

Ben opened the front door for her. She walked inside and toed off her shoes, just in time for him to shut the door behind him and go directly for her again, capturing her mouth with his as he bent down and advanced on her, backing her up against the rear of the couch. “I swear to God,” he whispered, trembling hands on the hem of her shirt as if he was afraid to lift it up. “I can’t, I couldn’t, all day, couldn’t stop thinkin’ about your pretty m-mouth wrapped around my dick. I had to take a cold shower to get rid of my damn boner— and that’s the  _ opposite _ of the problem I been havin’ for the last ten years—”

“It didn’t occur to you to just, just, think about getting a blowjob?” Rey asked, fumbling for his belt. 

“No,” he said, kissing the top of her head before he braced himself on the couch and slipped his boots off. “‘Cause the only mental image I had for that was, uh, not very— not real conducive to feelin’s of a particular nature, if you know what I mean.”

“Your whole situation is a big fat self-fulfilling prophecy,” Rey said, grinning as she watched him strip his flannel shirt off. “You try to get off, and you can’t because the only headspace you have for it is bad, and when you can’t do it, it just reinforces the bad headspace, because the next time you try you’re just reminded of the previous failure.”

“Headspace,” he echoed, standing between her knees. “Hm. I like that. Sounds like therapy. That like the place in your head you gotta go in private?”

“That’s it exactly,” she said, and hooked her fingers through his belt loop. “Don’t take your pants off yet. Um, sit on the couch for me.”

“Right,” Ben said, and dutifully shuffled to the sofa, leaning back and spreading his knees a little, watching her through heavy-lidded eyes. Rey went to the kitchen, found her errant hair tie, came back in, and knelt on the scratchy carpet, tying her hair up into a ponytail to keep it out of her face. 

“Okay,” she said, gazing up at him, her hands resting on his knees. “If there’s something you don’t want me to do, tell me. You can hold my head, but don’t shove me down on you, and don’t try to thrust into my throat, or choke me because that is  _ not _ how this works outside of porn and I might barf on you.”

“Yes ma’am, copy that,” he said, a frantically twitching thumb the only sign of his anticipation. Rey undid the snap and fly closure on his jeans, gently pressing against his groin, and was encouraged to find a still-healthy erection beneath her fingers, hard as stone beneath the denim. Ben blushed. “I… been like that since the diner,” he confessed, darting a glance up at her. 

“Hmm.” Rey ran her thumb across the edge of the waistband of his underwear. “Sounds like it might start hurting if someone doesn’t do something about it.”

Ben sucked in a little breath, squirming as she tugged his boxer-briefs down, letting half his cock poke out. “Oh, God,” he groaned as he lifted his hips, letting her tug his pants down and off, leaving him half-naked, in socks and his T-shirt, his underwear hooked around his left ankle. Rey didn’t bother pulling it off all the way as she settled down between his knees. “I thought, I always thought women didn’t like givin’ head, on account of the— the mess—”

“Well, not all women are the same, are they? Take your T-shirt off. Sit on it.” Rey patted his thigh, and Ben quickly obeyed, shucking off his shirt and tucking it under his ass. His body was… big. Wide. Very broad. Very nice, even though he was sporting a wicked farmer’s tan and his chest was about the color of Elmer’s glue.  _ Focus, _ she thought, reaching up and brushing a soft, flat nipple with her thumb. 

“Uh,” said Ben, jerking a little, and shut his eyes. “What are you—”

“I’m getting you warmed up,” she said, playing with the other nipple and watching him huff a little, watching him throw his head back, expose his throat. “You never heard of foreplay?”

“Not for a man,” he said gruffly, and let out a yelp as she leaned forward, raising herself on her knees, and kissed his chest. “Hey, now, that—” Her lips closed over his nipple, her teeth gently worrying at it in between soft sucks, and Ben choked, gripping her waist with both hands as she worked at him. “ _ Hey, _ ” he squeaked, and Rey felt extremely gratified: his voice had probably ratcheted up a whole octave. “Ahh,  _ ah,  _ Rey, Rey that, that,  _ oh _ —” 

“Yeah?” she asked, letting his now-hard nipple pop free of her lips. “You okay?”

“Killin’ me,” he gasped, letting his hands slip up her body as she slid down to position herself between his thighs again. “ _ Foreplay.  _ I—” Whatever he meant to say next was lost in a garbled, choking string of noises as Rey gently licked the head of his flushed and dripping cock from just under the head to the back of it. He smelled like nothing but skin and a faint echo of Irish Spring, (which she’d never, ever be able to smell again without being aroused, she just knew it) and he tasted like clean skin mixed with the slight saltiness of his precum. Rey lifted her head to see him tense, both hands gripping the sofa cushions as if he was preparing for a crash-landing, his head tilted up and staring at the ceiling as he gasped for air. 

“You can look at me, you know,” she whispered, laying her cheek on his thigh. 

“Can’t,” he whimpered, trembling. “Oh, God—”

“Hey. Ben.” Rey pressed her hand to his knee, rubbed him in gentle circles. “What are you afraid of?”

“I—” He sucked in a breath that sounded like it was being ripped apart on the way into his lungs. “I— I’m scared if I look down, all I’m gonna see is— is— I don’t, I don’t—” One wide hand dragged down his face, and when he spoke again, his voice was hoarse with tears. “If I move past this and, and, then I, it’s like, it’s, means I didn’t care about any of it. Any of them. I gotta— I don’t know. Do my— time. It’s— like a punishment, ‘cause I lived and they didn’t, they didn’t, they  _ died _ —”

“Oh, Ben,” said Rey, rising up onto her knees and pulling him into a hug. He readily went to her, tears dripping off his nose as he buried his face in her shoulder, his arms locked around her tightly. “Ben, Ben, shh. It wasn’t your fault. You know that, right? You did your best.”

“If I’d done my best I’d be dead and they’d all be alive,” he sobbed, clinging to her like a rock. “How can I move on and be, be happy again and go back to how it was when I got this  _ weight _ tied around my goddamn neck?”

“You feel like you’re betraying them,” Rey said softly. This was something she understood, at least. “I felt like that too when I lost my— well, not my parents, since I didn’t even remember them, but I had a foster mom I loved so much when I was twelve, and she died of cancer and I was so angry about it for such a long time. And when I stopped being angry, I just hated it, because it felt like I was doing her dirty by moving on and liking my new foster parents. Is that how you feel? Kind of?”

“Yeah,” he said, choked up somewhere in her neck.

“Okay. Then I know I can’t— I mean, no matter what I say, I can’t make you feel differently about it. I can’t make you understand like I do now that healing’s better than sitting and drowning in your own guilt and grief for the rest of your life, because you have to work that out on your own time.” Rey stroked his back, pressing her cheek to his hair. “But if you’d died and they’d lived, I guarantee you they’d all be in your position, or something like it. Right?”

He sniffed. “Right,” he croaked, and sagged into her, as if he was exhausted. “You’re right. I know that, in my head, y’know, but in my heart and soul I just— I— I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“What do you think you’ll see if you look down?” she whispered, fighting the urge to rock him like a child.

Ben’s breath was deep and shaky. “I don’t know. Cadie, maybe. Maybe a ghost, come back to haunt me for not mournin’ him enough.”

“Well, I’m not a ghost,” said Rey, stroking his hair back from his ears, “and I’m not Cadie.”

He snorted. “That’s for damn sure.” Another deep, gusty sigh. “I’m sorry. Can we… can we try again?”

“Sure,” she said, pressing a kiss to his bare shoulder and watching his skin shiver as he leaned back again: eyes wet, lips bitten. “If you need me to stop, I’m right here. Just tell me.” He grunted, shutting his eyes with a nod, and Rey shuffled off the sofa and wedged herself between his thighs again. His cock had flagged a little, sinking to half-hard, but a few gentle swipes at his sensitive nipples took care of that: he was ready to go again in a few moments, the head flushing deep rose, the shaft swollen. “You know,” she mused, running her finger up and down the vein on the underside, “your dick’s a lot like you.”

Ben chuckled, a breathy little noise. “How’s that, then?”

“Wide, tall, and blushing all the time,” she teased, and he actually smiled, teeth gleaming as he looked at the wall. “Okay. I’m going to stop talking now. You can talk all you want, tell me what you need. Just remember—”

“Don’t choke you,” he finished, nodding and still not looking at her. “Got it. Go on, then.”

Rey licked a gentle, slow stripe from the base of his cock to the very tip. Ben groaned a little, squirming, but didn’t ask her to stop, so she gently plied the flat of her tongue onto the head, rubbing gently. It was a shame he’d been circumcised, really: that alone had probably lost him some sensitivity, but from how he was breathing under her, she guessed maybe that didn’t matter in this particular case. 

_ “ Ohhh _ ,” he moaned, low and long. “That’s, that—”

Rey notched her lips at the tip, wrapped them gently around him, and sank him into her mouth, all the way to where she was comfortable, which was just at the back of her throat. She made herself focus on gripping the rest of his dick, and not the torrent of noise pouring out of Ben’s mouth like a dam had broken loose, because it was very, very distracting, but at least he was staying still. She chanced a look up at him, which was a little easier since he was half-reclining, and saw that his throat was tense and corded, his hands covering his face as he shook silently. 

“Breathe,” she reminded him quickly, slipping off his cock for a second, and waited until he sucked in a breath between his hands and nodded at the wall before going back down again, setting a slow, gentle rhythm with her mouth and her spit-slick hand.  _ Good. Slow. Careful. Is he going to lose it and face-fuck me? He better not.  _ “Mmmm,” she hummed around him, using her free hand to stroke the expanse of hard muscle above his navel. “Mmm-mm.” His body hair was coarse and dark, untrimmed and tickling her nose, but it wasn’t like hers was much better, and honestly, who cared about that? 

“Ah, ah,  _ ah,  _ shit, shit, fuck,” Ben groaned, his thighs tensing. 

“Mmm?” she asked.

“I, I—” One of Ben’s hands flew down to take her by the ponytail, and  _ that,  _ that was actually hot as hell, being slightly manhandled. Rey moaned around his dick as he guided her awkwardly into a slightly quicker beat, her head bobbing up and down. “Y-yeah, like, I think, like, shit,  _ shit _ —”

_ It’s okay, _ she wanted to tell him, but couldn’t.  _ Look at me. Look at me. See me. Just me.  _ Rey reached further up again and stroked his nipple, and he sighed, hips jerking in a mostly-aborted movement. “Sorry,” he gasped, hand still clutching her hair, eyes still apparently trained on the ceiling. “Not, not gonna,  _ uh  _ okay  that’s good, it’s good—”

_ Now we’re getting somewhere.  _ “Mmm?” she prompted, keeping the rhythm steady as he panted under her. 

“Yeah, good. I think— I— I—” A loud, hoarse breath left him, and his thigh tensed beneath her. “I’m, I,  _ close,  _ I think I can’t, I,  _ sorry _ , I'd’n know if I can—”

Rey reached for his free hand and grabbed it tightly, rubbing the work-rough knuckles that were white where they gripped the sofa’s edge. “ _ Mmm _ ,” she said forcefully, and Ben— it was like he knew what she was thinking, and she was gazing up at his chin when he finally tilted his head down, eyes screwed shut like a child afraid of the dark, and forced them open, bleary with tears, to look down at her. 

His mouth dropped open, his eyebrows tilted up into an inverted V, and Rey’s eyes were already watering just from the strain of keeping her mouth open so wide, but she blinked the dampness away just in time to see his jaw muscle cord itself into knots. “R- _ Rey _ —” was all he could get out, and then a gush of hot, salty, thick fluid hit the back of her throat and he was shaking from head to toe, lips open in a silent, airless cry as tears poured down his cheeks.

Rey couldn’t take him anymore. She pulled off his dick, trying desperately to swallow what felt like a pint of cum and gasping for air as his cock, her hand still working it, spurted across his abdomen, his chest, his thighs, her borrowed shirt; thick gobs of it, and it just kept coming and coming. Ben was shaking, toes pointed and curled, every muscle wound like a spring, eyes trying to focus on her. She thought he might be slightly cross-eyed, but his hair was so damp with sweat and stuck to his forehead and hanging in his eyes she couldn’t tell. “Hey,” she rasped, coughing. Her jaw was sore, and the alkaline taste of him lingered in her mouth. “Ben? Ben, are you okay?”

He didn’t answer, just went slowly, gradually limp as his cock finally stopped drooling cum everywhere, his head tilted back, his chest heaving as he sobbed for air and the back of his hand still clutched in hers where it lay on the sofa. Rey wanted to go get a drink, but didn’t want to leave him there, not for a moment. Ben looked wrung out and used. Totally wrecked. It was, admittedly, a very good look. She took off her already-stained shirt, using the clean spots to dab the streaks of cum off his belly and chest as she knelt over his lap. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” she repeated gently, trying her best to tidy him up with just her shirt.  _ God, I think I killed him. I think I sucked his soul right out.  _ “Ben, can you just— make a noise, or something? So I know you’re not dead?”

“Nghh,” he groaned, lips parting.

“Thank fuck,” she muttered, cupping his cheek in her palm and wiping away the tears with her thumb. “Hey, hey. You’re okay, right?”

Ben’s wet eyes opened and focused on her, his hands still trembling. “Hey,” he muttered, looking dazed. “I’m… okay.”

“You want a glass of water or something?” she asked anxiously. 

“I… did I black out?” he mumbled, half to himself as he brought up a hand to swipe at his wet face. “I don’t… I don’t remember nothin’ past sayin’ your name.”

“I think you might have,” said Rey, trying her hardest to not feel incredibly pleased with herself as she stroked his sweat-sticky hair out of his eyes. “I’ll go get you water.”

“Rey,” he said softly, an unstable hand drifting up her bare arm. “Stay here a minute. Don’t go.”

“Oh, okay. I won’t go anywhere.” Rey settled down beside him, curling up into the curve of his arm as he heaved a deep sigh and curled around her, burying his nose in her hair as he breathed and breathed. “Better?” she offered after a few minutes. 

“Yeah,” he whispered to the top of her head. “Yeah. I’d— I’d ask to go lay down, but I don’t think I can walk yet.”

She giggled. “It’s fine. I’ll help you. Here.” Rey stood and dragged him up to stand, and he groaned the whole way up, leaning on her shoulders as he stumbled along beside her to the bedroom, where she put him down on the bed and crawled up beside him. Ben curled into her side, his hand clinging to her waist and his face buried in her neck, and gave a deep, exhausted sigh.

It wasn’t until his hand went heavy and limp, slipping off her, that Rey realized he was passed out, dead asleep. She raised herself up on one elbow and looked down at him. Possibly, she thought, she’d expected to see Ben looking younger, at peace, his face smoothed out— but he just looked totally drained: dark circles beneath his damp eyes, his lips chapped.  _ Poor guy,  _ she thought, and bent her head down, pressing a kiss to his cheek.  _ I’ll go get him water anyway.  _

Rey slipped off the bed and went for the kitchen, pouring a glass, and stretched for a moment: she hadn’t done yoga in almost a week, and her neck and back felt pleasantly wrung out after she reached for the ceiling and pointed her toes.  _ Ahhh.  _ Glass of water obtained, she turned for the hall, and almost jumped out of her skin. Ben was standing, boxer-briefs pulled up at a drunken angle across his hips, in the hall, and he looked dazed. 

“You scared me—” she began, more annoyed than worried, and that was when he took a stumbling step toward her and gripped her by the shoulder, making her almost drop the cup.

“You said you wouldn’t leave,” he rasped, eyes brimming with tears. “I thought— I woke up and you—”

“I’m here,” she reassured him quickly, bringing her hands up to cup his cheeks. “I am, I’m here, I went to get you water, I thought you were sleeping.”

Ben inhaled, shaky and ragged, and drew her in close, embracing her tightly. When he spoke again, he sounded about a million years old. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry I scared you.”

“Hey,” she said into his chest, awkwardly patting his back. “It’s okay. Do you want to go back to sleep?”

“I— I’ll have some water, if you don’t mind, and then I think I— I want to be by myself a little while.” Ben pulled away, eyeing her cautiously. “Just a bit. Just to think about things.”

“I won’t go anywhere,” Rey promised. “I’ll be right here.”

He closed his eyes like he’d been waiting for someone to say that forever, and sighed, deep and soft, before pressing a kiss to the top of her head and carefully taking the cup of water from her hands.


	6. end in fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw for light choking during sex!

Ben was silent and kept to himself all evening. Rey sat in the house wearing a borrowed flannel shirt and nervously looking out the windows as her host, a big shadow in the dusk, paced around the yard and did… well, he did some odd things that didn’t make much sense to Rey, but must have made sense to him. 

He got dressed again in jeans and a T-shirt and a denim work shirt, and went out into the yard to furiously split every piece of wood he had with lightning speed. When that was done, he walked around in circles, swinging his arms, gesticulating to himself, and muttering under his breath: his hands came up to scrub across his face, he squatted in the dirt rocking back and forth on his heels, he walked around some more, and finally he swung the maul into the dirt over and over like the earth itself had insulted him, and with every slam of the heavy iron into the ground, he bellowed out a name: the same six names, over and over. 

_ Ash. Leong. Wilde. Kennard. Simpson. Rodgers.  _

He shouted them over and over, in the same order every time, until the sun had gone down and the fireflies were twinkling in the shadows, until he’d dug a packed hole into the ground and the maul slipped from his bloody, blistered fingers as he stood there, shoulders heaving and shaking, head down.  Rey wanted to go to him, but she didn’t know if she should: he had wanted to be alone, hadn’t he?  _ You’re not alone, you don’t have to be, _ she wanted to cry out through the windows, but kept herself silent for his sake. 

At last, Ben turned toward the house, blinking as he wiped his eyes, and began to slowly amble up on to the deck, up to the door, up to open it and step in. “Hey,” he said, sounding quiet, tired, voice wretchedly hoarse as he didn’t look her in the eye and went to the kitchen drawer. “Gettin’ the matches. Bonfire.”

“Can I come?” she asked, unsure of herself. 

Ben still didn’t look at her. “Mm,” he said, and darted a glance in her direction. “You go on, then. I gotta get some things.”

Rey chewed on her bottom lip and went to the back door, shoving her feet into the old Converse before he could change his mind, and hurrying out to the backyard. The evening was cooler than the day, so she was glad she had the flannel shirt, but there weren’t any chairs out by the fire pit. She was wondering if she should drag one of the big chairs off the porch when Ben stepped out, his arms full of stuff, including what looked like a big old quilt. 

“We can sit on this,” he said by way of explanation, and dropped everything in a heap, barely looking at it as he went to the pit and started building the fire. Logs all tilted towards each other in a thick, wide triangle that reminded her of a tipi, twigs and smaller things were piled beneath the logs, newspaper was crumpled beneath the kindling in wads. Ben knelt in the dirt, striking the match and letting it glow for a moment, illuminating the strange shadows on his face before he let it catch to the paper. 

Rey spread the quilt out and left the other stuff in a pile, sitting on the fabric and watching in interest as the paper caught, lighting the kindling, and catching slowly to the dry, split wood. Ben, on all fours, blew on the fire in long, even breaths, then sat back on his heels and watched it glow, the flames licking higher. When the blaze was crackling merrily to his satisfaction, he got up, turning his attention to the pile of stuff he’d pulled out of the house.  In the light of the fire, Rey could now see what they were: two beers, a first-aid kit, and his uniforms. All the camouflage pants, jackets: the patches, the contents of what looked like every box in the bedroom were spread out across the grass. Ben leaned down and picked up a jacket, took a breath, and tossed it onto the flames. “Starched ‘em,” he muttered under his breath, and Rey had no idea what that meant, but the fabric began to burn, melt, and smoke on the logs. He watched, silent, and threw another piece on. Then another.

“Could I—” Rey hesitated: he was holding the REN’S KNIGHTS patch and the bloodied, stained jacket now. “Could I keep something? Something small. It doesn’t have to be a jacket. Something you don’t care about. So I have something to remember you by when I— when I have to go.”   
  


“Small,” he muttered, as if considering, and knelt, digging around in the pile before he came up with the box, the black leather case, and opened it, taking out the medal inside— she’d never asked him what it was. “You take that, then. Won’t burn, and I don’t want it.”

She turned it over in her hand: the dark blue ribbon, the bronze cross with the ship inside. “What’s this one called?” she asked, trying not to sound like she was prying too much.

“Navy Cross,” he answered shortly, piling on more fabric and tossing the dusty, bloodstained old jacket onto the fire. Another pair of pants, and another jacket: the fire was billowing smoke, but the jackets were burning, and Rey crossed her legs, looking down at the medal in her fingers. 

When they had all vanished into smoldering rags, Ben finally sat down beside her on the quilt, legs bent and splayed out, and looked at his hands. Rey could see the congealing blood on his palms, the place where blisters had formed and broke, and the dirt creased into the lines of his skin. “You want me to get the first-aid kit?” she asked.

“Not for a minute,” he answered, his fingers flexing a little as he looked up into the fire. One single, deep, even sigh, and his eyes were shut, basking in the warmth of the flames as his face finally relaxed, smoothing out into something younger, fresher, softer.

“Did that feel good?” Rey prompted, hoping she wasn’t being too invasive.

“Mm. Yeah. Letting the past… just go. Up in smoke. Felt like breathing again.” Ben opened his eyes and flexed his hands, wincing. “Ow.”

“I’ll patch you up,” Rey said, patting his shoulder as she reached across him to get the kit. He remained quiet as she wiped his hands clean of the drying blood with an alcohol wipe (which must have hurt a lot, but Ben never made a sound) and patched up his hands with Neosporin, Band-aids and gauze pads. Even the insides of his fingers hadn’t escaped, so she put a few nonstick pads onto the broken blisters there and wound his palms and fingers with gauze bandages to hold everything in place. “There,” she said, tucking off the end. “Now you just look like a mummy.”

He snorted. “Some mummy.” Both golden-brown eyes slid over to hers again, like whiskey in the light from the fire, and he licked his lips nervously. “Don’t suppose—I don’t know how often women, uh, like to get— get intimate, but—”

Rey swallowed hard. “You want to go inside and, um—” 

“Not inside,” he said quickly, low and soft. “Not—I don’t think I’d make it inside.” He reached for her hand with bandaged fingers and guided it to the fly of his jeans, and— oh, right. Yeah. No, he definitely wouldn’t make it, not judging by the way his pupils were dilated and the flush staining his cheeks that wasn't just from the heat.

“Oh,” she said, heart pounding as she mapped out that intimidating length again through the denim. “So— here on the, on the quilt?”  _ He wants to bang me outside. Outside. And you’re gonna let him. Rey, you’re out of your mind.  _

“If you’ll have me,” he said, leaning ever so carefully toward her, those intense eyes focused on hers. 

“You don’t, don’t have any neighbors who might object?” Rey breathed, leaning in to meet him. 

“Not for a coupla miles,” whispered Ben, and after he’d said that his mouth was slotting across hers and his tongue was breaching her lips and she tasted salt and skin, his mouth as warm as the fire burning in front of them, his fingers working at her buttons. He broke the kiss to tug her shirt off her shoulders in a surprisingly forward move, and took a moment to look down at her bra. It wasn’t anything special, just a plain, comfortable nude-colored thing that she’d been wearing since Monday, but the way he was gazing at it made her feel like it was straight off the cover of Elle. “Can I, can I take that off?” he asked, eyes darting up to her face.

“You can take anything you want off me,” Rey panted, her insides turning to soft, hot mush, the pure insistent need to have him feeling like it was soaking her underwear.  _ Oh my god, oh my god.  _ Her breath was coming in short little bursts, her belly tight with anticipation, skin tingling: she couldn’t imagine how he must feel.

Ben leaned down and tugged the bra off her, fumbling with the clasps for a minute but succeeding in slipping the whole thing off, and gaped, blushing, at the sight of her tits. “God damn,” he said reverently, reaching out and brushing the pad of his thumb across her tightening nipple. “Real pretty.” Rey’s hands were already pushing the denim work shirt off his shoulders, then tugging at the hem of his shirt, and he stiffened as she made to pull it up. “What’re y—”

“You don’t want to take your shirt off?” she asked, pausing. 

“No, I— thought maybe you wouldn’t want to see…” Ben ducked his head and rubbed his nose self-consciously again, and Rey sighed, then finished tugging off both his shirts, exposing his solid, pale, scarred upper body to the firelight. He looked like he was made of gold, of marble. If he’d been a statue in the Met, Rey thought, dizzily, they would have had to name him  _ The Angel Of Light. _ Or  _ War’s Leavings.  _ Something grandiose and iconic and corny like that.

“I want to see this,” she whispered, bending down and kissing his scarred shoulder, “and this,” she said, pressing another kiss to his waist, “and this...” and her fingers found the scar dividing his right pectoral, tracing the roughness there. “I like all of it. All of you.”

“You like… me?” he asked, in a tone of voice probably normally reserved for asking a girl to prom.

“Yeah, of course I do,” Rey said, pulling her head back. “I— God, that’s just— yes, Ben, I do. I wish I could stay here with you. Forever.”

His eyes searched her face, and slowly, his mouth spread into a shy, crooked smile: the exact same one Rey had seen on the Kodak photographs inside. “I was just thinkin’ how I’ve never been to New York.”

Rey grinned back at him. “Yeah? You want to go?”

“With you one day?” he asked, trailing the pads of his fingers up her waist to brush at the underside of her breasts. “You’d like that? I’d be liable to get plenty lost in a big city. You’d have to meet me at the airport. Help me out a little.”

“You wouldn’t have to go out much,” she whispered as earnestly as she could, running her hands down his wide chest. “I have an apartment in Manhattan. We could just, just, you know— stay indoors all day till you got used to it.”

“Indoors... or in bed?” Ben asked, a glint in his eye, and Rey blushed furiously, ducking her head. 

“In— in whatever you want,” she managed, wriggling closer to him as he snagged her chin between his fingers and tilted her face up to look at him. 

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he said gently, eyeing her with a sort of reluctant grief.

“I mean it,” said Rey, caught off her guard. “I really mean it. I don’t care what anyone says or does about it, either. I want you with me.”

“You want... _me_ ,” he echoed, like he still couldn’t believe it.

“I’ll show you,” she said in a fit of inspiration. “Can I... just let me show you how much I want you, okay? Trust me?”

“Mm,” he said, but he let her drag his dirty jeans off, and his boots, too, and all his clothes, and then he let her push at him until he was laid out, gleaming in the firelight, on the quilt, gazing up at her with heavy eyes and a nervous expression. Rey didn’t care that he smelled like an evening’s worth of hard labor, or that the bandages on his hands were slightly stained, or that his hair was lank and damp from sweat: she shucked off her own clothes as fast as she could and threw her legs across his hips, rocking on him a little as his mouth fell open in awe and his bandaged fingers grasped reflexively at her thighs. 

“You okay?” she asked, rearing up on her knees to reach for his cock, which was half-stuck between her leg and her labia with drying sweat.  _ I am going to get a fucking UTI, oh my god, I know it, I just know it. Worth it. So worth it. I’m just going home, popping ten AZO pills, and hoping for the best.  _

Ben’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. “I th-thought this was, this was one of those things you only see in, um, porn, like they say it ain’t somethin’ folks do with each other for real—”

Rey fought to not laugh as her hands stilled. “What? No, that’s for, like, deepthroating and jackhammering, and like, that— that thing where a dude slaps a lady’s vagina with his dick and she acts like it’s the most pleasurable thing ever.”

“Oh,” said Ben, blinking. “Does this mean— is—” Realization dawned over his face, along with a fierce blush. “Is, is, the position where a lady’s on all fours and gettin’, uh, done from the back, that’s—”

Rey bit her cheek hard. “Doggy style? Yeah, that’s a thing. Do you want to do that instead?”

“I—” He looked torn.

“Or, you know, we can do this for a minute, then flip around and change it,” she offered.

“You can—” Ben looked completely awed beneath her, his eyes wide. “You can  _ do _ that. Huh.”

“Yes, you can,” Rey said, smiling in spite of herself as she notched him at the tip, biting her lower lip in concentration as she drew him back and forth, gathering the dampness to ease her way down. Ben grunted and his hands tightened on her legs as she sank down a little, lifted herself back up off the patch of dry skin she’d gotten stuck on, and tried again. "You can, um, do anything if you just practice. Work at it."

“Shoulda got lube at the corner store,” he said, shooting a concerned look down where their bodies were trying to join.

“Don’t— no, I don’t need it, just, just— touch my boobs,” she managed, hot in the face, and Ben’s eyebrows quirked up, but he raised himself off the quilt and sought out her breasts, his nose practically brushing them as he rubbed at them with his big fingers. 

“Like this, I guess,” he mused, and then leaned forward, taking what felt like her whole breast into his mouth and sucking gently, tongue rolling around the nipple. Rey let out a moan as heat raced through her spine, puddling between her legs… and he sank in, another inch, then another, then the whole way down as she wriggled and bounced and gasped, bottomed out flush against his hips. “Jesus,” he whispered, and maybe it was a prayer or a curse, but the way he said it, Rey couldn’t tell. “Feels so good.”

Rey yelped as he raised his hips, driving deep into her and back down in a clumsy, testing thrust that did nothing but ram him against her cervix. “Shit, ow,  _ shit _ ,” she gasped, planting her forearms on either side of his head. “Here, just keep me, keep me right here and pull out a little when you— when you move, otherwise it doesn’t feel right.”

“Oh,” he wheezed, and gripped her ass in his hands, carefully raising her halfway off, then lowering her down onto his cock, and  _ that,  _ yes, that was good, really good, and Rey groaned into his hair, his neck, his ear as he began to pick up the pace, his breath coming in uneven little gasps. “Oh, shit,  _ shit _ , that’s good, that’s so g-good, Rey, sweetheart, I—” A choked gasp, and he was straining suddenly, voice gone thin and ragged. “Shit,  _ shit,  _ I think I’m gonna come, gonna come, where do you, do— you— it—”

“Don’t come yet,” she begged, squirming on him: she was  _ not done _ with this dick, and had plans to follow through on. “Don’t, don’t, don’t—”

With a cry like it was killing him, Ben yanked her off his cock and gripped her tightly up against his belly, bellowing the frustration out into the space between her neck and his mouth. “God  _ damn,  _ damn, damn,” he groaned, his hands like iron across her lower back. “ _ Fuck _ , Rey—”

“Just trust me,” Rey managed, trying to kiss him through the curtain of hair between them. “You can, you can— here, get behind me.”

He heaved his weight up as she got into position, legs spread and ass up, suddenly chilly in the night air, but Ben moved in quickly to warm her, groping around between her legs and feeling out the new angle before pressing himself in again and sheathing himself with a slick, obscene sound to the hilt. “Aw,  _ fuck, _ ” he groaned, almost collapsing over her, but catching himself at the last second with his arm. His free arm curled beneath her torso, gripping her close as he bent his head down, mouth pressed to her shoulder, slack and open and wet. “Rey,” he grunted, moving his hips in a slow, uneven thrust that sent a fresh wave of pure bright  _ need _ and  _ desire _ and all that other good shit lancing through Rey’s body like electricity. “Fuck, sweetheart— you want me to come like this?”

“I wanna come first,” she slurred, throwing her head back as the hand supporting her found her left tit and pinched absently at the nipple. She squealed and spread her legs further, willing him in, in, in.  _ I’m going to be covered in beard burn and bruises and I don’t even care, my stylists will kill me, I don’t care.  _ “Fuck,  _ fuck _ , I want—”

“I know what you want,” he growled, and moved his hand down lower to work at where their bodies were connected. It took him a moment, but he was a quick study, and Rey groaned as the first of what she hoped was many orgasms to come gushed through her nervous system and spread through every limb, making her shudder and whine as she tried to hold herself up with loosely trembling arms. “That’s good,” he panted. “There’s a good girl. You got another one in you?”

“Please,” she begged, the heat from the fire baking her right side in a deep, even glow of heat. “You can, you can, ch-choke me, if you’re careful about it, I, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since you s-said— since you—”

“Quit your fussin’,” he said softly, and pressed a kiss to the curved shell of her ear. “I’ll do whatever you want, sweetheart.” His big, broad, bandaged hand came up and gripped her throat with unbelievable gentleness, cutting off the blood flow and making her deliciously lightheaded as he started a rhythm between her spread thighs, his other hand supporting his weight. “Now I don’t have no free hand to touch your clit, so you’re just gonna have to come on your own this time,” he said firmly.

“Uhhhh,” Rey gasped, her whole body feeling like it was floating, the pressure between her pelvis and her insides building, building, his cock pressing into every fucking nerve— “ _ uhhhh, ahhhh, Ben _ —” and she was coming again and again and Ben’s hand was free from her neck and she was gasping for air, her knee pressing into a rock under the quilt in the dirt and grass, tears running down her cheeks from the sheer force of it all. “I love you,” she sobbed, naked with her ass up, his dick crammed deep into her body, and Ben’s movements stopped, instantly cut off. “I— I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

“No,” he said roughly, and pulled out of her. 

Rey had just enough time to think blearily  _ oh, no, oh god, I’ve made a huge mistake— _

But he was flipping her over, raising her ankles up over his shoulders and ramming into her again, to the hilt without any resistance at all. “Don’t say that,” he gasped above her, eyes gone black in the shadow from the firelight. “Don’t you  _ dare _ , don’t you say that to me, don’t you break my heart—”

“No, I love you,” she gasped, reaching for his face. He swatted her hands away lightly and kept on rutting like an animal in short, brutal movements, faster and faster: she had the feeling this was about more than what she’d said. “Ben—”

He shook his head sharply, damp hair sticking to his forehead as his jaw worked. Both warm hazel eyes looked about a million miles away, focused on something she couldn't see. “I ain’t the kind of man you love, not a good man, I’m the dirty broken kind y-you fuck and throw away—”

“I’m not gonna throw you away, I’m not, I’m  _ not _ —”  _ Oh my god, am I going to come again? No, I don’t think so. I think I’m all orgasmed out. Or am I? Shit. Shit.  _ “I meant it. I mean it. Every word.”

A short, choked noise burst past his lips. “T-tell me, tell me. Rey. Tell me.”

“You’re a good man,” she insisted as the thrusts became even more brutal and punishing in their pace. “A good man. A whole man. A nice man. I’m not gonna throw you away, I’m gonna keep you, keep you forever and ever, right next to me until you’re bored to death of me, oh, god, _god,_ you’re fucking hitting the f-front like this, Ben, _Ben_ —”

“Tell me,” he begged, winding one hand into her hair. “Rey—”

She couldn’t breathe. The building pressure was going to break her. “Ben, Ben, I love you, I love you, I love you, you’re so  _ good _ —” and light burst through her body, soaking her from her head to her toes: she wailed and squirmed on his dick, trying to relieve the pressure. Ben crushed her close, fucking into her in short, hard, fast thrusts before he let out a torn-sounding yell, his movements stuttering, his breath coming in gasps, and Rey felt the wet, pulsing warmth of him gushing inside her. 

He collapsed between her legs, spent and trembling, all his limbs gone limp, as if he was a puppet whose strings had all been cut at once. “Rey,” he muttered, and she knew he was crying. “Rey. I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” she asked, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and stroking his hair. He shut his eyes and hid his face in her chest, his body wracked with silent sobs. “Shh. Ben. Hey. Shh.”

“Not sayin’ I love you back,” he croaked into her skin, muffled. “I ought’ve said it. I dunno what came over me. Got in a funny kind of… what d’you call it. Headspace? That.”

“You can say it whenever you feel comfortable saying it,” Rey assured him, closing her eyes against the firelight. “It’s okay. I— I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that. I don’t… ever say that.”

“No?” He raised his head. “Not ever?”

“No,” she said honestly, and gnawed at a piece of skin on her bottom lip as she looked at the stars and the sparks from the fire floating up into the sky. “I just… nobody’s ever made me feel like you make me feel.”

“You make me feel,” Ben said softly. “You make me feel a whole awful lot of things I— I wanted to stop feelin’, at first, and now…” He sighed, gusting out warm air over her chest, and when he spoke again it was with careful, precise diction. “Now I never want to stop feeling like this.”

Rey closed her eyes, feeling nothing but bone-deep contentment. Well, that and the slick, strange feeling of cum dripping out of her, but other than that? Contentment. “We could sleep out here,” she said softly, resting her cheek on his head as he scooted up her body a little to get more comfortable.

Ben snorted. “So much for your tender city girl sensibilities. Sleepin’ outside under the stars. Mm.” His arms folded and unfolded alongside her until he was spread out atop her like a starfish on a rock. “Guess we could… have a nap. For a second. I don’t wanna move.”

“Me either,” she said honestly, and kissed the part of his head she could reach before drifting off into a quiet, dazed almost-sleep, just on the edge of twilight as her eyes drifted shut.

She hadn’t moved in a while, and Ben must have thought she was asleep, because he shifted the tiniest bit to turn his head and very quietly whisper “I love you” right before she was pulled into the dark undertow of sleep.

* * *

When the tow truck arrived on the outskirts of Kirby, the driver had a hell of a time trying to track down the renter of the Honda Civic, which, judging by the dust, had been left on the side of the road for a couple of days, and which he couldn’t tow without the renter present. Eventually a waitress at the only diner in town gave him directions to “Ben’s place” and when the driver rolled up to a neat little doublewide trailer on several acres in the lumbering, large vehicle, he got quite an eyeful of a panicked couple racing from the backyard into the back of the doublewide trailer. 

Quite an eyeful. Like, you know, T&A and _plenty_ of D, but Poe Dameron had been raised right, thank you very much, and knew not to make a scene out of weird or uncomfortable situations.

He lingered around by the door for a while, staring at the sky and his watch and wondering what the appropriate amount of time would be to wait until both parties had resumed being decent and fit for public consumption, but in the end he gave them five minutes before trudging up to the door and knocking politely.

A giant of a man opened the door. Poe blinked up at him: easily six foot four, black hair in long, unkempt tangles; a beaky nose, squinting eyes that seemed to look right through Poe, ears that stuck out at right angles from his long head. He wore a white T-shirt and a loose blue plaid shirt, unbuttoned, over that, and both his hands were bandaged up like a boxer's.

“Morning,” said Poe cautiously. “I’m looking for a Miss Rey… Niima?”

“Mm,” grunted the giant, and stepped aside to reveal a very pretty woman with freckles and brown hair and a cute little straight nose, wearing a silk blouse that was very dingy and a pair of khaki shorts. She was also sporting a terrific swath of reddened skin from her throat to her cheeks, but Poe kept his mouth shut.

“Hi!” she chirped, as Poe tried to forget he’d just seen both these people completely nude and sprinting while clutching blankets. “You must be from the towing company. I’m Rey.”

“I’m… Poe,” he said. “Nice to meet you.” He pulled his clipboard out and peered down at it. “Okay, so I’ve been told you need to get to New York City? We have a dealership in Kokomo, so I’ll be able to drive you straight there and get you set up with a new rental car. I’m sorry about the delays, too, so let me apologize on behalf of Millennium Rent-a-car for your inconvenience.”

“Yeah, that’s correct,” said Rey Niima. “And thank you. Are you—” She turned back to the taciturn giant, who was standing there just watching everything with a completely unreadable expression, but she must have mastered the art of reading it, because she hesitated and turned back. “Are you going to drive me back to the Civic?”

“I’ll drive you,” said the man, and Poe was not about to argue with a voice or a face like that, even if it did go against company policy. “I’ll follow behind.”

“Okay,” said Poe, turning on his heel and making a mental reminder to start applying for literally any other job than this one. “Follow me out, then.”

* * *

Rey slipped out of the F-250, the soles of the old Converse crunching on the gravel. “Are you sure I can’t give you back your shoes?” she asked Ben as he slid out of the driver’s seat and shut the door. 

“Yup. Not usin’ em. Plus you need ‘em.” He offered a shy little half-smile, which faded as Poe got out of the tow truck, lowered the bed, and started hooking the Civic up to the chains. “Hm,” he grunted. “You gonna drive fifty miles in a truck with that guy?”

“Sure. He’s a tow truck driver. I’m pretty sure they have to do background checks.” Rey shifted her tote bag to the other shoulder. “Why?”

“Mm,” he said non-committally, and glared at nothing in particular. “He better keep his hands to himself.”

“Oh, my god.” Rey smothered a grin behind her hands. “For your information, he’s not my type. At all. I mean, except in one way.”

“What—” Ben looked flummoxed as she marched up to Poe, signed the paperwork, and stepped back to watch the Civic be dragged onto the bed of the tow truck. “In  _ what _ way?” he demanded as the bed evened out flat and Rey turned to him as Poe climbed up into the cab and waited.

“I’m gonna call you. Write a letter. Find you on the internet. Something,” she promised, resting her hands on his chest, over the thin layer of cotton. “I swear. And when I do, I’m bringing you straight to me. I’ll pay for everything.” She pressed a kiss to his lips, and he sighed softly, cupping the back of her head: it was over too soon. 

“But Rey,” he insisted as she pulled away, still holding his hand until the last possible second, “ _ what  _ way—”

She laughed as she hopped up on the running board and held onto the handle. “Ben Solo,” she called down at him, beaming, “I absolutely can’t  _ stand _ facial hair!”

Ben’s mouth fell open beneath its badly-trimmed mustache, and then he began to laugh like he hadn't laughed in years as she swung the car door open, slid inside, and shut it behind her, waving and laughing back at him out of the window as the truck ground to a start and slowly, slowly pulled away down the road to the interstate, leaving him only a blot of white and blue on the brown of the road behind.

* * *

There are items that make up every room, every house, every life. Items in purses, objects in cars: items we casually toss into corners, into trash— things we save and keep and put on shelves, things that tell a story about the people who have them.

In the cab of a tow truck hurtling toward Kokomo, Indiana, a heavy medal on a ribbon sits in the inside pocket of a tote bag, placed there by the woman who’s asking the driver about the closest place to get her phone repaired once they reach their destination.

In the bathroom of a prefabricated house in Kirby, an electric razor, dusty with disuse, is gripped in the hand of a man who eyes his own reflection and raises it to shave a face that hasn’t been touched by a blade in years— not since 2009 in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan.

And in the refrigerator of that same house, a full plastic pitcher of fresh sweet tea brewed by someone who’s no longer there is waiting to be drunk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND WE ARE DONE. press F to pay respects to poor Poe's sensibilities. I can't think of any notes at all for this chapter except to say that I'd be lying if I hadn't been inspired by thegutlesswonder's incredibly reylo art on twitter for the outdoors blanket sex scene. please go follow NOW.
> 
> i'm definitely not planning to continue this but feel free to ask me anything about headcanon or ideas or whatever in the comments!! thank you all so much for reading!!


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